In a series of five experiments, we demonstrate that moral judgments and folk intuitions are often predictably fragmented. Drawing on the domains of ethics and action theory, we illustrate ways in which judgment tends to be associated with stable individual differences such as personality traits and reflective cognitive styles. We argue that these individual differences pose several unique challenges as well as provide opportunities for further theoretical development in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Implications are briefly discussed.

Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research.

human action

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the ‘master argument’. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call ‘conservative restrictionism ’ as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism. 1.

In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. These studies also illustrate some problems that pertain to all of the studies that have been run thus far. In the free will literature, compatibilists and libertarians alike claim that their respective views best capture our ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. So what is the most useful way of understanding and addressing this sort of intuitional stalemate? One of the primary goals of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe intuitions in a controlled and systematic way in order to shed light on precisely these kinds of

In press with Philosophical Psychology. Abstract: According to intellectualism, what a person knows is solely a function of the evidential features of the person's situation. Anti-intellectualism is the view that what a person knows is more than simply a function of the evidential features of the person's situation. Jason Stanley (2005) argues that, in addition to “traditional factors, ” our ordinary practice of knowledge ascription is sensitive to the practical facts of a subject's situation. In this paper, we investigate this question empirically. Our results indicate that Stanley's assumptions about knowledge ascriptions do not reflect our ordinary practices in some paradigmatic cases. If our data generalize, then arguments for anti-intellectualism that rely on ordinary knowledge ascriptions fail: the case for anti-intellectualism cannot depend on our ordinary practices of knowledge ascription. Imagine that you and your friend Bill are hiking in the woods. You come across a rickety old bridge over a shallow, five-foot ravine. Bill ventures safely across. Do you know that the bridge is safe for you to cross given that it is safe to cross? Imagine that the bridge spans a one hundred-foot drop. Now do you know? Intellectualism implies that the answer to both questions

Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to philosophy. In this paper, I defend the significance of experimental philosophy by defending the significance of intuitions – in particular, by defending their significance from a recent challenge advanced by Timothy Williamson. 1.

Empirically minded researchers (e.g., experimental philosophers) have begun exploring the “folk ” notion of intentional action, often with surprising results. We extend these lines of research and present evidence from a new paradigm in experimental philosophy using some methods of behavioral economics. Our experiments indicate that in some circumstances people make strikingly different judgments about intentions and intentionality as a function of whether they bring about or observe an event. In some of these circumstances, a well-known asymmetry in intentional action attribution, the side-effect effect, can be reversed. Implications for traditional action theory and the experimental study of folk intuitions are discussed.