Polling as Pedagogy: Experimental Philosophy as a Valuable Tool for Teaching Philosophy

First, we briefly familiarize the reader with the emerging field of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers use empirical methods, rather than armchair speculation, to ascertain laypersons’ intuitions about philosophical issues. Second, we discuss how the surveys used by experimental philosophers can serve as valuable pedagogical tools for teaching philosophy—independently of whether one believes surveying laypersons is an illuminating approach to doing philosophy. Giving students surveys that contain questions and thought experiments from philosophical debates gets them to actively engage with the material and paves the way for more fruitful and impassioned classroom discussion. We offer some suggestions for how to use surveys in the classroom and provide an appendix that contains some examples of scenarios teachers could use in their courses

Piercing the smoke screen: Dualism, free will, and Christianity

Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, (2) that people with predominantly incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and (3) people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies (n = 378) that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity

The Mind, the Brain, and the Law

In this chapter, we explore the potential influence that advances in neuroscience may have on legal decision makers and present the findings from some recent studies that probe folk intuitions concerning the relationships among neuroscience, agency, responsibility, and mental illness. We first familiarize the reader with some of the early research in experimental philosophy on people\u27s intuitions about agency and responsibility. Then, we focus on a more specific issue—namely, whether people respond to explanations of human behavior framed in neuroscientific terms differently than they respond to explanations framed in more traditional folk psychological terms. Next, we discuss some new findings which suggest that explanations of criminal behavior that are couched in neural terms appear to make people less punitive than explanations couched in mental terms, especially in the context of mental illness. Finally, we offer what we take to be the best explanation of these differences in people\u27s intuitions—namely, when people are presented with neural explanations of human behavior, they tend to think that the agent\u27s “deep self” (the values and beliefs the agent identifies with) is somehow left out of the causal loop or bypassed, which in turn mitigates the agent\u27s responsibility

Not what I expected: Feeling of surprise differentially mediates effect of personal control on attributions of free will and responsibility

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will

Carbon turnover in Alaskan tundra soils : effects of organic matter quality, temperature, moisture and fertilizer

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2006. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Blackwell for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Ecology 94 (2006): 740-753, doi:10.1111/j.1365-2745.2006.01139.x.Soils of tundra and boreal ecosystems contain large organic matter stocks, typically as a layer of peat that blankets the underlying mineral soil. Despite the low productivity of northern vegetation, organic matter accumulates as peat because decomposition of plant litter is limited by low soil temperatures and often wet, anaerobic conditions (Heal et al. 1981, Jonasson et al. 2001). The total C storage in this northern peat is globally significant, accounting for about one third of the global soil C stock if one includes both tundras and boreal forests (Oechel and Billings 1992, Callaghan et al. 2004a). Soils of northern ecosystems also contain large amounts of organic N that is currently unavailable to plants, but is potentially available and could support higher productivity if mineralized (Shaver et al. 1991, Nadelhoffer et al. 1992, Weintraub and Schimel 2005 a). Controls on soil C stocks and turnover, therefore, are key issues for understanding C exchanges between northern ecosystems and the atmosphere. In this paper, we determine how C losses from peaty soil organic matter are related to its chemical composition, and how that composition changes as the organic matter decomposes. To address these issues we compared four soil organic matter types from three tundra ecosystems near Toolik Lake, Alaska. The comparison included both unfertilized soils and soils that were fertilized annually for eight years before sampling. Under laboratory conditions, we determined how temperature and moisture conditions affect C losses from these organic matter types. The experiment also allowed us to determine how the chemical composition of different types of organic matter changed over four simulated “seasons” of decomposition. The chemical composition or “quality” of soil organic matter is a useful predictor of C turnover (Ågren and Bosatta 1996) although a wide range of definitions and fractionation schemes have been used (Sollins et al. 1999, Harmon and Lajtha 1999). In general, high-quality organic matter is defined as that which is more readily processed by microbes and has a higher rate of decomposition. Fresh plant litter and newly-formed organic matter are expected to be of higher quality than older, more fully decomposed organic matter in which the more labile components have been metabolized (Aerts 1997, Berg 2000). Species composition of the vegetation may also have a strong influence on litter and organic matter “quality” (Berendse 1994, Cornelissen 1996, Hobbie 1996, Hobbie and Gough 2004). In this research we characterized organic matter quality with a widely used sequential extraction procedure (Ryan et al. 1990, Harmon and Lajtha 1999) that breaks soil organic matter into 4 fractions: (1) a “non-polar extractable” (NPE) fraction extracted in methylene chloride, (2) a “water-soluble” (WS) fraction extracted in boiling water, (3) an “acid-soluble’ (AS) fraction extracted in H2SO4, and (4) an “acid-insoluble” (AIS) residue.This research was supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology and Office of Polar Programs to the Marine Biological Laboratory

Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefs

Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will

Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about free will and moral responsibility

Abstract: Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy ’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research