Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@LUISENRIQUE21

@briannaswaybaby

@DrEmanKSA

@sjpf_pt

@DivineAccended

@pinkchyu

@tunateisyoku

@LanaSumati

@ACEJKSUPREMACY

@iamandycohen

@swamptime_

@basedwetard

@Tramvia_Lloret

@TuanKGG

@0013_kl

@RafaelA95751132

@gakken_zukan

@SP14572

@Neobie5

@princekhan1250

@weijers3

@cxaxk_breakdown

@__SHl0N

@21lifegoeson21

@M7MD18030383057

@bailliekvyhnal

@AboSulaima23807

@mindenpaper

@KimMUSAU

@fallynfreije

@PSLoslagos

@MezeraJosef

@mer_chantal

@PlentyOfWaifu

@ctrndmycyc

@PlentyOfWaifu

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Like many academics, I am very much on the left, and I worry that I might be doing certain things (perhaps subtly) that make conservative students feel unwelcome in the classroom I want to be better about this. What are some things I should try to do or avoid doing?

3K

204

4K

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

I have a new theory about interdisciplinary research The theory is: epistemic lunch People in different disciplines will never truly be able to understand each other's research just by reading published papers. They have to actually get together and have lunch

34

102

815

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

People think it sounds right to say’true love,’ ‘true happiness,’ ‘true sadness,’ ‘true fear’ But they think it’s wrong to say ‘true grumpiness,’ ‘true lust,’ ‘true stress’ Any ideas about why you can say ‘true’ for some emotions but not others?

120

130

810

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

I think most philosophers aren’t aware of just how rapidly the discipline of classics is imploding these days Traditionally, there has always been a tight connection between philosophy and classics, and I’m not sure what the implosion of classics will mean for our field

29

71

609

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Yale philosophy has officially replaced the grad program “logic requirement” with a broader “formal methods requirement.” Students can choose which course to take (logic, probability, stats, game theory, etc.) Feels like a symptom of a much larger change in the discipline

60

66

578

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

11 months

This paper is amazing Goal: To understand how philosophical education impacts philosophical intuitions Method: Tracking a sample of undergrad philosophy majors for their entire college career, giving them the same thought experiments each semester

(PDF) The influence of philosophical training on the evaluation of philosophical cases: a control...

PDF | According to the expertise defense, practitioners of the method of cases need not worry about findings that ordinary people’s philosophical... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

www.researchgate.net

9

78

436

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

People from working-class backgrounds often say that certain aspects of the culture in academia feel weird and alienating Are there specific things we are doing that especially exacerbate this problem?

160

43

375

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

9 months

Philosophers keep claiming that the ordinary, intuitive view is that there are objective facts about this or that domain (color, aesthetics, religion, etc.) And experimental studies keep finding, over and over again, that these claims are not true true 🧵

52

56

366

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 months

People keep suggesting that we can directly translate natural language expressions for probability into numerical probabilities. But don’t be fooled! Studies show that natural language expressions use a fundamentally different system from what we see in numerical probabilities

Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social

@datavisFriendly

3 months

Here's a cheat sheet for knowing what words to go along with different "probablies" ...

3

53

314

11

45

322

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

9 months

Yale has a unique program in which students can get a Combined PhD in Psychology and Philosophy The admissions process for this program is pretty counterintuitive in certain respects, so I wrote up an informal explainer about how to apply

Notes on Applying to the Combined Program

How to Apply to Yale's Combined Program in Philosophy and Psychology The application process for Yale's philosophy/psychology combined program is a bit counterintuitive, so I thought it might be...

docs.google.com

3

61

311

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

I am curious about why the woke vs. anti-woke debate is so relentlessly stupid I mean this as a serious empirical question, and I'd be interested in hearing some real hypotheses about how to explain it

67

21

297

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 months

Some people believe in objective moral truths, while other people are more drawn to moral relativism Empirical research has taught us a lot about which specific traits are associated with moral relativism Here are some of the key results from the literature so far:

26

65

298

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Twitter sometimes offers an inaccurate picture of how philosophy is changing If you look at what’s actually being published these days, one of the most salient changes is that philosophy is going in the same direction as the rest of academia: everything is getting more sciencey

18

47

268

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

5 months

The experimental philosopher Stephen Stich is retiring from Rutgers, and I wanted to take a moment to celebrate his extraordinary legacy One amazing thing about Steve is the way he continued to produce innovative and important work right up to the moment of retirement

11

54

269

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

In academia these days, it feels like there’s a disturbing link between (a) being guilty of sexual misconduct (b) framing one’s research in terms of a struggle for social justice I wonder if people have any insights into this issue

40

16

250

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Experimental studies consistently find that many people reject the idea of objective moral truths I don’t think the philosophical literature has been grappling seriously with this fact

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

23

28

230

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

6 months

There’s a moral asymmetry in free will attributions. People think you have more free will when you do bad things than when you do good things. But why? Previously, there were two rival explanations for this effect. Then today, a new one just came out

11

61

227

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Remember that recent meta-analysis that suggested that nudges have a very large impact on behavior (d=.45)? This new paper argues that if you correct for publication bias in the usual ways, the effect size estimate turns into something MUCH smaller (d = 0.01 to d=0.08)

PsyArXiv-bot

@PsyArXivBot

3 years

No reason to expect large and consistent effects of nudge interventions

0

5

26

6

41

216

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

I don't think that @ZoeZiani has gotten enough credit for this beautiful attempted replication of Casciaro, Gino & Kouchaki, 2014 In retrospect, I'm very struck by the prescience she shows in her final paragraph

6

22

215

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

9 months

@victorckumar There’s a beautiful paper on this by @M_Prinzing and @daft_bookworm Overall, they find little convincing evidence that studying philosophy leads to better critical thinking. Instead, it looks like better critical thinkers decide to study philosophy

Does Studying Philosophy Make People Better Thinkers?

Philosophers often claim that doing philosophy makes people better thinkers. But what evidence is there for this empirical claim? This paper reviews extant evidence and presents some novel findings....

osf.io

8

31

184

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

Why do we find opposing intuitions about philosophical questions? I argue that recent results suggest a new picture: - It’s mostly NOT about different people having different intuitions - It’s about individual people having CONFLICTING INTUITIONS

14

35

185

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

In this time of a crisis in the humanities, some humanities professors are writing stirring defenses of the humanities Speaking as a humanities prof, I think that most of these defenses are awful and do nothing to rebut the attacks on our field

13

19

181

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 month

People think it makes sense to say “a meaningful life,” “a meaningful relationship,” “a meaningful death” - but not “a meaningful hammer” or “a meaningful evil” Do any of you have hypotheses about what people mean across these cases when they call something “meaningful”?

40

27

172

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 months

Experimental philosophy paper in Nature Communications on the concept of wisdom across cultures Findings: Striking invariance across 8 different cultural regions. In all of those cultures, the two core dimensions are reflectiveness and empathy

5

48

173

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

I used to think that philosophical intuitions could be pushed around by subtle situational factors - but almost all of those studies have now failed to replicate Big review paper arguing that philosophical intuitions are actually surprisingly stable

Joshua Knobe, Philosophical Intuitions Are Surprisingly Stable Across both Demographic Groups and...

philpapers.org

6

52

164

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

There are a lot of opinions floating around about what you should do when you are PhD student, but I disagree with all of them My opinion is: Different people are different. There is no single answer about what everyone should do when getting a PhD

9

18

162

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Our new paper (now in press) about why people value sad music We provide evidence for a particular hypothesis, but independent of that, I’m curious to hear folks on here think the right answer is. Why do you think people value sad music?

27

164

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Back when I was an undergraduate, I interviewed the philosopher Richard Rorty Just thought it might be a good idea to put up the interview, in case anyone happened to be interested

7

29

156

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Contemporary moral psychology began in the early 2000s, and back then, the usual view in social psych was that you can’t change people’s values with arguments This @aecoppock book makes an *extremely* strong case for the claim that this view was wrong

Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics (Chicago Studies in American...

Persuasion in Parallel: How Information Changes Minds about Politics (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

www.amazon.com

6

38

152

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

28 days

When I was an undergrad, there was a vibrant connection between the phil dept and the German dept, and I learned a lot of philosophy in German Studies classes Tragically, German Studies as a discipline now seems to be imploding. What impact is this likely to have on philosophy?

8

5

156

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Sometimes we say you 'think' something, and sometimes we say you 'believe' it this beautiful paper looks at five different cultures and five different languages, and finds that people always seem to draw the distinction in the same way @tanyaluhrmann

To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding

Abstract. Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others...

direct.mit.edu

7

39

149

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

I keep seeing people asking “Have philosophers contributed anything to neuroscience?” This question betray a mistaken understanding of what philosophers actually do these days The correct answer is: Yes, because some philosophers are doing straight-up neuroscience research

19

21

144

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Some theories posit a deep connection between (a) generic language and (b) stereotyping and prejudice A few years ago, I thought these theories were completely correct, but a wave of experimental results have been calling almost every aspect of them into question

4

31

143

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

A bunch of embodied cognition papers have been retracted for data fraud I’d love to hear thoughts on what this shows about embodiment. Are we learning something about that research program and whether its central theses are true?

9

25

141

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

8 months

I’m interested to hear what people think the replication crisis means for the free will debate An avalanche of replication failures suggest our behavior can’t be pushed around willy-nilly by situational forces. Does that mean that we have more free will than we thought we did?

Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

Good piece. It's genuinely quite strange that so much of Sapolsky's work cites extremely unreliable "findings". Does he just not have any scientist friends? Or are there just whole areas of science where people still haven't heard of the replication crisis?

7

11

101

39

22

139

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 months

A friend just introduced me to the concept of “s-hacking” (stimulus hacking) S-hacking is like p-hacking, except that instead of trying different analyses until you get the results you want, you try different stimulus materials until you get the results you want

11

22

139

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

8 months

It feels like many aspects of our everyday practices as philosophers tend to promote a focus on: (a) the ideas that were defended by people perceived to be great philosophers rather than: (b) the ideas that are actually best supported by argument and evidence

21

25

133

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Massive survey of philosophers: Turns out birth year is positively correlated with use of (a) empirical methods and (b) formal methods In other words, the younger generation is using both empirical and formal methods more than the older generation is

3

30

136

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

I was talking the other day with @smickdougle , and we had a thought about the big message of psychology research from the past decade or so Our thought is that the big message is: Everything is exactly as it seems

8

25

133

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

If a person has done lots of bad stuff in the past, we give her less credit for doing a good thing now But interestingly, the effect is asymmetric. If a person has done good stuff in the past, we do NOT give her less blame for doing a bad thing now

Frontiers | Moral contamination: Perceptions of good (but not bad) deeds depend on the ethical...

In the majority of moral decision-making research, we are asked to consider the action of someone we know little about—an anonymous actor. This is inconsiste...

www.frontiersin.org

8

24

134

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

5 months

Philosophical work in mind and language these days feels so deeply different from what we saw in the 20th century. It’s not just different in content; it feels like a whole different activity I have some thoughts on the difference, but I’d also love to hear other perspectives

8

12

130

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Over the past 20 years, there has been an EXTREMELY sharp increase in the proportion of philosophy papers that are co-authored

3

17

123

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

11 months

In a paper from a year ago, @hanno_sauer argued that we should be devoting less attention to the history of philosophy and more to contemporary research informed by science Let’s try to have a real discussion about whether this claim is true or false

The end of history

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant ...

www.tandfonline.com

12

23

121

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Around 20 years ago, there was a big movement in philosophy that aimed to dethrone a priori moral psychology in favor of empirically-informed moral psychology I’d love to hear thoughts from people on both sides about where things stand with that movement now

9

11

122

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Aristotle and Kant made deeply important contributions to moral psychology, but in contemporary philosophy, they are sometimes treated with a reverence that feels a little unhealthy I once heard someone say that a lot of virtue ethics reads like "Aristotle fan fiction"

10

8

113

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

8 months

For some thought experiments, there’s an ongoing philosophical debate between two positions, X and Y One striking trend in experimental philosophy research is that ordinary people often endorse a response of the form: In one sense, it’s X, but in another sense, it’s Y 🧵

11

15

119

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

9 months

Experimental aesthetics has been making exciting progress in lots of different areas (aesthetic objectivism, definition of art, paradox of fiction, imaginative resistance…) This new paper is a quick review of the key findings in all of those areas

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics

In this chapter, I present a comprehensive review of the literature on experimental philosophy of aesthetics.

osf.io

0

35

119

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

You buy a normal lottery ticket, and - through sheer luck – you end up winning the lottery. Here, it seems wrong to say: "You won the lottery intentionally" Why? A series of recent experimental papers argue that this effect is actually pointing to something pretty fundamental

2

19

121

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Yale is hiring in cognitive science. The goal is to find someone who doesn’t fit clearly into one discipline (psychology, linguistics, philosophy, etc.) but who spans multiple disciplines For example: a philosopher/psychologist, a psychologist/linguist or a linguist/philosopher

5

55

120

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Seems like the whole world is talking about the news that data from this famous study on honesty was actually fabricated Here are some thoughts about the original scientific question itself 1/

Joe Simmons

@jpsimmon

3 years

I used to teach this finding to my MBA students. It has more than 400 citations on Google Scholar. It's about dishonesty. Turns out it's fraudulent. "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty"

30

295

1K

4

41

119

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Perhaps it would be helpful now to switch over to exploring the "boring" factors that seem obviously to impact people's behavior Instead of looking for surprising, counterintuitive effects, we could aim for a *deeper* understanding of factors that we already know have an impact

3

13

118

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Experimental philosophy research suggests that many people don't believe in objective moral truths This new linguistics paper builds on that finding to ask: Do words like “moral” and “ethical” show the usual hallmarks of subjective adjectives?

5

23

117

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

A number of years ago, there were tons of studies purporting to show that subtle changes in your situation could shift around your philosopical intuitions. Now almost all of those findings are failing to replicate The latest one to fall: being drunk makes you more utilitarian

Michał Białek

@mbialek82

3 years

Does alcohol affect moral decision-making? Not much, or not at all. See our new paper with @Mariola87880133 @JimACEverett just accepted at PSPB.

3

15

75

4

40

119

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

New study finds that there are now three kinds of philosophy departments in the Anglophone world: Traditional analytic departments, continental departments, and… science-oriented departments @pcontrerask @danieljhicks @diceyjennings

9

33

114

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

There has been a real change over time in the nature of bullshit empirical claims The old way of bullshitting was just to assert things with no evidence, whereas the bullshit we see today often has a veneer of science (e.g., there are studies, but they are all p-hacked)

4

18

113

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

9 months

When you face a decision, you usually have so many options that you can’t possibly consider them all. So how do people determine which options to consider? Our new paper with Joan Ongchoco and Julian Jara-Ettinger

2

23

115

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Article suggesting that classics has entered a stage of “terminal decline”

Is Classics’ empire in terminal decline?

With contention about diversity adding to concerns about employability and declining student numbers, does Classics in the US need rebranding or rethinking? Paul Basken reports

www.timeshighereducation.com

4

16

105

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

There’s a lot of debate in experimental philosophy about whether ordinary folks have a concept of phenomenal consciousness Here’s a quick summary of some of the evidence on the side that says: Yes, there is indeed a folk concept of phenomenal consciousness

6

19

114

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

One obstacle to progress in general jurisprudence is the almost cult-like reverence of Hart and Dworkin Hart and Dworkin made important arguments, and we should continue to take those arguments very seriously - but we need to stop treating their books like religious texts

10

18

114

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

There's an old debate in philosophy about whether ownership and property should be understood in terms of (a) human convention or (b) natural rights New paper in Cognition finds hat people's ordinary intuitions involve a complex mixture of the two

5

25

108

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

4 months

Why do we punish people for negligence? New paper argues it is a matter of punishing people for a *failure of thought* -- i.e., for failing to bring certain things to mind By @SarinArunima and @fierycushman , in Psych Review

5

27

108

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

5 months

This new cross-cultural study is pretty amazing People show a complex pattern of judgements as to whether false implicatures count as lies — but that whole complex pattern seems to be extremely robust across cultures Work from @AlexWiegmann1 et al.

2

23

105

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

6 months

New experimental philosophy of art paper on the ordinary concept of beauty The results suggest that the concept BEAUTIFUL has a fundamentally different structure from, e.g., the concept PRETTY

3

14

107

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Our new manuscript on why people are drawn to sad music Given that sad music often makes you feel bad, why are you so drawn to listening to it?

9

21

105

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Sometimes it happens that another researcher provides strong evidence against something I said... but then people just keep on citing my original paper and ignoring all the evidence against it To address this problem, I created this new webpage:

8

19

103

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

I was just thinking that it might be nice to have a thread to congratulate all the philosophers who've done experimental work who got jobs this year For each philosopher, I've included a link to one of their experimental papers So excited about all these amazing people!

2

28

102

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

22 days

Conservative philosophers often say that (a) there is a bias against conservatives in philosophy hiring and (b) this is wrong Thus far, those of on the left have mostly just ignored this whole issue. So let’s discuss this Are (a) and (b) true or false?

77

13

103

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

New paper from @mcxfrank 's lab attempts to replicate a whole bunch of classic cross-cultural difference studies, finds that almost all of them fail to replicate Here is the result for person/situation attributions: h/t Edouard Machery

2

30

102

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

What are people’s ordinary intuitions about the mind-body problem? Francisco Cruz and André Mata have an exciting new series of studies showing that people tend to have *conflicting intuitions*. They are drawn to dualism but also drawn to physicalism

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

Why do we find opposing intuitions about philosophical questions? I argue that recent results suggest a new picture: - It’s mostly NOT about different people having different intuitions - It’s about individual people having CONFLICTING INTUITIONS

14

35

185

6

19

98

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Our new paper on how people attribute emotions! Now out in Cognition People think you can be happy in some sense, but not have "true happiness." And similarly, people have a notion of "true love," "true sadness," "true hatred." How should these notions be understood?

Michael Prinzing

@M_Prinzing

1 year

True happiness comes from writing papers that reflect one's true self! @xphilosopher @briandavidearp and I find that evaluative judgments affect the way that people attribute emotions by affecting whether people think those emotions well up from deep down inside.

2

4

12

4

22

98

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

11 months

Yale has a new search for a prof in cognitive science of language This is a very unusual job, and it’s worth saying a little more about it

Laurie Santos

@lauriesantos

11 months

The @Yale Cognitive Science Program has just opened a search for a tenure-track open-rank faculty appointment in the cognitive science of language. Come join me here at Yale (and please RT!):

3

122

218

2

27

95

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

The people answering this poll say that a behavior *more* reflects the true self when it goes against your second-order desires This is the exact opposite of the traditional view within philosophy

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

A college student is caught between two majors, A and B She sometimes finds herself staying up late at night to read books about A — but she believes she should be focusing on B, and she wishes she didn’t keep wanting to read about A Which is her true self calling her toward?

12

5

24

14

13

92

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

11 months

New studies from @peez on what people signal through their meta-ethical commitments Results indicate: relativism signals tolerance for disagreement, while objectivism signals intolerance

Signaling (in)tolerance: the reputational implications of metaethical relativism and objectivism

Prior work has established that lay people do not consistently treat moral questions as matters of objective truth or as merely being true relative to different perspectives, but rather these...

osf.io

8

26

96

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

Yale Cognitive Science has two new open faculty positions These are very unusual positions -- interdisciplinary positions, chosen through an interdisciplinary search

3

26

91

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

This is a thread to celebrate the philosophers who have done experimental work and who just got new jobs I’m dazzled by all the amazing work these people have done, and super excited about the new positions they’ve received

1

21

95

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

As researchers, we spend most of our time thinking about theories, so when it comes to interventions to change people's behavior, it's natural for us to think of interventions that change people's theories I used to believe in these interventions, but now I'm not so sure

14

20

92

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

I’m director of undergrad studies for our cog sci major, and in the past few years, I’ve noticed a real shift in student interests The shift is: less neuro, more computational I wasn’t sure whether that was just happening here or whether it was happening at other schools too

11

5

92

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

6 months

Suppose you are going to spend your life as a computer programmer. Many people think that you should still know something about the humanities. For example, you should still have spent time thinking in a serious way about great literature Is the converse of this also true?

36

10

90

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Experimental philosophers have run lots of studies in which people are asked whether or not an agent ‘knows’ something Most of these are looking solid, but there’s a particular type of study that keeps failing to replicate

2

24

88

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

There’s been a surge of exciting work on the connection between morality and epistemology Some people have been studying this issue empirically, others have been exploring it purely philosophically — but so far there has been remarkably little dialogue between the two

3

15

88

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

4 years

Boom! Exciting new experimental philosophy paper with tons of new cross-cultural findings Previous studies found that intuitions about knowledge are surprisingly similar across cultures. This paper takes things even farther

Yuan Yuan & Minsun Kim, Cross-Cultural Universality of Knowledge Attributions - PhilPapers

philpapers.org

1

20

87

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Jim Woodward is coming out with a new book, looking at the psychology of causal judgment and how it relates to philosophical questions about causation

Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology (Oxford Studies in...

Causation with a Human Face: Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology (Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science)

www.amazon.com

1

22

84

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Can there be a replication crisis in philosophy? New paper by @wesbuc explores the idea that many of the core features of the replication crisis can arise even when people seem not to be doing empirical work

1

22

86

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

One of the most striking results from experimental epistemology is that people’s intuitions about whether something counts as ‘knowledge’ can be influenced by their *moral* judgments Here’s a new meta-analysis of 98 different studies on that effect

3

30

85

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Children’s fiction often features villains who are portrayed as fundamentally evil (e.g., Voldemort in Harry Potter) New developmental paper asks: Do children nonetheless think that, deep down, these villains actually have a morally good true self?

3

14

83

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

6 months

The key idea: When you reason correctly, people think there’s nothing you can do to change your view But when you reason incorrectly, people think you are free to change. You can change your view through further reasoning

6

15

84

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Article about the coming “post-classics future” (in which departments of classics simply cease to exist)

September 2021 – AHA

www.historians.org

2

11

71

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Over time, the public is coming to care ever less about the humanities and ever more about the quantitative sciences (psychology, neuroscience, economics, etc.) I love humanities scholarship, and I wanted to share some thoughts about how it could recapture the public‘s interest

2

12

81

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

4 years

Intriguing new paper from @chris_starmans on the weird conception of knowledge found only in philosophers Non-academic participants and academics from seven other disciplines show similar epistemic intuitions – but philosophers do something different

3

17

82

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Quantitative study of papers in philosophy journals shows a truly massive shift toward papers using 'probabilistic methods' (statistics, decision theory, causal modeling, etc.)

Daily Nous / Justin Weinberg

@DailyNousEditor

3 years

“If our data is representative of the philosophy literature, then the use of formal methods in philosophy changed starkly over the course of just a single decade.”

4

28

71

3

28

80

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

10 months

The crisis in the humanities is the sudden and truly massive decrease in interest in the humanities within academia To illustrate, here’s the change over time in the number of undergrads majoring in humanities disciplines

17

11

79

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

7 months

New experimental philosophy paper from @R_P_Doran on the relationship between morality and aesthetics When do people think that a morally good action is beautiful? Doran's results suggest: when people think the action affects the true self

Ryan P. Doran, Truly, Madly, Deeply: Moral Beauty & the Self - PhilArchive

philarchive.org

1

27

81

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

5 years

Extraordinarily comprehensive study of free will intuitions across cultures by Ivar Hannikainen and colleagues 20 cultures, 5,268 participants, beautiful design and analyses. This paper feels pretty decisive.

For whom does determinism undermine moral responsibility? Surveying the conditions for free will...

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate...

osf.io

2

31

77

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

When we get a biological explanation of behavior, sometimes we decrease blame, and sometimes we don’t. What is the difference? New @JProtzko paper finds we only decrease blame when we think the behavior doesn’t reflect the TRUE SELF

Not all Explanations are Equal: Only Explanations Invoking a Change from the true self Mitigate...

When do people believe that biological explanations, such as genes, brain damage, or abnormal hormones, mitigate punishment for crimes? We propose the way in which biology is viewed as impacting the...

osf.io

0

23

78

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 years

Many people know that the famous "belief in determinism increases cheating" studies consistently fail to replicate But I think many of these people don't understand WHY those studies fail to replicate Hint: It's not because the underlying theory turned out not to be true

2

15

78

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 months

Two salient trends in experimental philosophy: - Massive decrease in papers *about* experimental philosophy (e.g., on foundational questions about the field) -Massive increase in papers *doing* experimental philosophy (e.g., new experiments on detailed specific questions)

3

4

78

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

3 months

This reflects a core feature of the way natural language works These expressions don’t correspond to absolute numerical probabilities; they involve a comparison to what is seen as a ‘normal’ probability for the event (where what probability is normal depends on the event)

3

2

78

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 month

In our psych department, we have almost no one working in areas like psychology of religion or psychology of art. Why is that? I want to suggest a specific hypothesis - and it’s a hypothesis that predicts that these areas will start growing rapidly in the years to come

7

10

76

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

1 year

Suppose you do something bad. Will people blame you more if you knew it was wrong? Or will they blame you less? The answer seems to be: They will think your act is more wrong, but your character is less bad @yorl

2

21

78

Experimental Philosophy

@xphilosopher

2 years

Experimental philosophers, has anyone tried giving ChatGPT the vignettes and questions from any experimental philosophy studies? I'm curious whether it would give the same responses that the folk do

13

11

77