Sytsma on the folk theory of consciousness

Are people naive realists about colors? About pains? Do people think one can have pains without being aware of them? Do people conceive of their own subjective experiences as being phenomenal? And if not, how do they conceive of them? Are people disposed to ascribe experiences to group agents? In brief, what is the folk theory of consciousness?

Justin Sytsma reviews the literature in "Folk Psychology and Phenomenal Consciousness" just published in Philosophy Compass.

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New “evidence seeking” study supports folk sensitivity to stakes in third-person knowledge attributions--controlling for belief

In a previous paper (and blog post), I discussed some results (using a new experimental design: “evidence seeking” probes) which support the idea that folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes (practical interests). This result went against most previous x-phi studies on the subject, but is in accord with a lot of work in epistemology (assuming they make predictions about ordinary people's use of 'knows'). Wesley Buckwalter and others (including Josh May and Jennifer Nagel) made the fair point that my study may possess a confound in that the effect detected is really an effect on belief not knowledge. In a new study, I controlled for belief and continued to find that stakes made a difference to third person knowledge attributions. It is also worth mentioning that this new study aims to control for evidence as well as belief. I have argued here that previous studies may have a problem about controlling for evidence (See also Jason Stanley’s comments here comment #31 and other criticisms by DeRose here). So at least in some respects, I am tempted to think that this sort of study might be more reliable to detect sensitivity than some of the previous work. More details below.

For the original study, participants were given one of two vignettes (Low or High). They concerned a student (Peter) who can proofread one of his English papers before the paper is due. In the High condition, unusual circumstances make it so that if he has a single typo, he will lose his scholarship and this is very bad for him. In the Low condition nothing bad happens but he would still prefer to have no typos. Participants were then asked “How many times do you think Peter has to proofread his paper before he knows that there are no typos? ____ times”. It turns out that participants gave median answers of 2 and 5 for the Low and High conditions respectively. The difference was highly statistically significant. I took this to support the idea that folk attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes (this study was also replicated by Buckwalter). Now Buckwalter and others objected that the effect detected was really about belief not knowledge. The idea is that "high stakes" Peter will collect more evidence before settling on belief (a phenomenon well studied by psychologists and famously brought to bear on these issues by Jennifer Nagel).

As a response to this suggestion, I ran a further study that controls for belief. The vignettes were the same but I asked the following question (after asking some comprehension questions): “It turns out that right after Peter finished writing his paper, he formed the belief that there are no typos in his paper—and in fact there are no typos. But does he know this? How many times do you think that Peter has to proofread his paper before he knows there are no typos? ___ times.” Here again, people tended to give lower answers in the Low case than in the High case. And this difference is highly statistically significant Mann-Whitney (N=78) U=472.500 p=.003 (Mean Low= 2.44, Median Low= 2, Mean High=3.62, Median High=3). In my view, this result is explained nicely by the idea that folk third person attributions of knowledge are sensitive to stakes in the way that IRI would predict if the folk also accepted (or behaved as if they accepted) some principle connecting knowledge and action. I should also add that there is a stat sig. difference between my original high stakes case and the new high stakes case. This might very well be because Buckwalter and others were partially correct in that *some* participants were focusing on belief not knowledge. But an alternative explanation is that in the new study I am reporting today (but not in the old one I ran) participants were told that when Peter finished the paper there were no typos. I think this gives some reason to think that participants will think Peter will need to proofread less times (than in the original high stakes). So what do you guys think of this new evidence (going against the tide in x-phi) that folk attributions of knowledge (and not just "belief") are sensitive to stakes?

Does anyone actually think of surveys as a replacement methodology for the armchair?

Lots of noise, and occasional flashes of light, occasioned by that NYT forum. I've got a number of things I'd like to say in response to some of it all, but it's vexingly close to the start of the semester! But here's a quickie: I've seen a number of people talking about x-phi as though what x-phi is about is taking cases where we would traditionally have offered the armchair judgment that p, and replacing it with whatever the majority outcome is on a poll of the folk regarding p. We can quickly put aside the silliness there about the idea that we're offering some sort of majoritarian approach to philosophical methodology -- I'm pretty sure there's exactly zero actual x-phi papers that say anything like that -- there's a perhaps more interesting question as to whether at least some more sophisticated manner of replacing the armchair with intuition-surveys is intended. And it occurs to me that maybe no one has even something like that in mind, either. Basically, along the lines of the negative/positive x-phi divide, it seems that the negative folks are by and large kinda negative about using positive x-phi results as well; and the positive x-phi folks tend to be happy with a parallel-complementary-methods relationship with more traditional approaches. (I put myself squarely on the front side of that semicolon, of course.)

Am I right, then, that there is no actual experimental philosopher who endorses both a strong rejection of traditional armchair methods, and the idea that some sort of experimental methods can do the same sort of work that those traditional methods were meant to do? It's a view I'd argue against, but it's certainly not a crazy view, by any means -- does anyone hold it?

Experimental Philosophy Society -- Call for Abstracts

The Experimental Society for Philosophy (XPS) is putting together group sessions for the 2011 Central (3/30-4/2, Minneapolis, MN) and Pacific APA ( 4/20-4/23, San Diego, CA) conferences and we’re looking for new and exciting research! If you are interested in presenting your research at either (or both) of these group sessions, please send us a 1,000 word abstract explaining your research to xpsapa@gmail.com by 9/12/2010. In the email, please specify whether you’d like your work to be considered for the Central, the Pacific, or both.

X-Phi in the New York Times

The New York Times has a recent piece in their Room for Debate Series about experimental philosophy with short pieces by Knobe, Appiah, Sosa, Maudlin, Leiter, and Williamson. It is an interesting read. It is also worth noting the difference in tone in the two critical pieces. Sosa, who has clearly taken the time to read the work by experimental philosophy, has helpfully critical and charitable things to say. Williamson, on the other hand, presents the same caricature of experimental philosophy he has relied on in the past. When I read his remarks, I cannot help but get the feeling that he hasn't really read much of anything we have written. I, for one, find his mis (or non) reading of experimental philosophy both "comical" and ironic since he appears to reject what we do from the armchair. As such, he comes off as an "imitation" critic of x-phi and an arson of experimental straw men. But we have seen this from him before, so no surprises here I suppose.

Second special issue of the Review of Philosophy of Psychology

The second special issue of the RPP dedicated to experimental philosophy, which Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and I edited, is now out!

The table of content is really impressive (as was the table of content of the first issue):

1. Insanity, Deep Selves, and Moral Responsibility: The Case of
   JoJo by David Faraci & David Shoemaker
2. Investigating the Neural and Cognitive Basis of Moral Luck:
   It’s Not What You Do but What You Know, by Liane Young, Shaun Nichols &
   Rebecca Saxe
3. Folk Concepts of Intentional Action in the Contexts of
   Amoral and Immoral Luck by Paulo Sousa & Colin Holbrook
4. Folk Psychology, Consciousness, and Context Effects by Adam
   Arico
5. Knowledge Isn’t Closed on Saturday: A Study in Ordinary
   Language by Wesley Buckwalter
6. Imagining Crawling Home: A Case Study in Cognitive Science
   and Aesthetics by William P. Seeley
7. The Proper Province of Philosophy by Justin Sytsma
8. Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy by
   Max Deutsch
9. A New Role for Experimental Work in Metaphysics by L. A.
   Paul

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Eminem and Nietzsche on Experiment Month

Some of you may already know that the deadline for Experiment Month proposals is September 1st, but I doubt you've seen anything like this.*

* All credit for the video goes to a friend who really just happened to be that inspired...

Free Will and Psychological Distance

Just a quick note to say that Chris Weigel has an exciting new paper forthcoming on psychological distance and intuitions about free will. (For a brief summary, see this post.)

What Metaphors Mean

Consider the metaphorical sentence:

(1) God is my copilot.

Now suppose that someone asked you to explain precisely what this sentence meant. You might be able to say various things that would provide a sense of more or less what the sentence was supposed to convey, but it seems that you would never be able to capture the full richness of the metaphor itself: inevitably, you would end up leaving something out. A number of philosophers have pointed to this striking difficulty we face in explaining the meaning of metaphors and used it as the basis for philosophical theories about the nature of metaphor itself.

In a forthcoming paper, Mark Phelan takes up this supposed fact about our inability to paraphrase metaphors and subjects it to actual empirical study. But Phelan introduces a surprising new twist. Instead of simply asking people to explain what metaphors mean, he compares people's ability to explain the meanings of metaphors with their ability to explain the meanings of perfectly literal sentences. So, for example, people's ability to explain the meaning of sentence (1) could be compared with their ability to explain the meaning of the sentence:

(2) Bill Thompson is my copilot.

Phelan asked experimental subjects to give paraphrases for metaphorical sentences; then he took these paraphrases and presented them to other experimental subjects, asking them whether the paraphrase captured the full meaning of the original or whether it left something out. Just as one might predict, subjects felt that the paraphrases inevitably left something out. This confirms the usual philosophical view. However, when Phelan did the same with paraphrases of perfectly literal sentences, he got exactly the same result! In fact, he sometimes found that subjects were, if anything, more likely to think that something had been left out of the paraphrases of literal sentences than they were to think that something had been left out of the paraphrases of metaphorical sentences.

In short, it looks like it really is pretty impossible to explain what a metaphor means. But that is not because of anything special about metaphors. It is merely a reflection of the fact that we can't explain what any sentence means.

Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Episode 1

First, I'd like to thank Martha Nussbaum for putting her considerable rhetorical skill, argumentative ability, and professional reputation behind Not for Profit. This is the book that I suspect academic humanists have waited a long time for: a spirited, lucid, and accessible defense of their profession that directly confronts the challenges the humanities have faced over the past few decades, particularly at the higher education level. It is thus a worthy successor to her earlier book, Cultivating Humanity.

Since ISW is a philosophy teaching blog, I'd like to focus on two concerns that relate to the responsibilities of philosophers as humanistic educators. The first is philosophy's relationship to other humanities disciplines; the second, philosophy's reputation not for building human knowledge, but for destroying it.

Reading Not for Profit, I kept thinking about how often I feel compelled to defend philosophy, but how rarely I feel compelled to defend the humanities. Indeed, I occasionally forget that philosophy is typically classified with the humanities disciplines. In some respects, this reflects what I would call a mild estrangement between academic philosophy, especially as practiced in the English-speaking world, and the other humanities disciplines. This is a familiar point that I need not belabor (for some earlier discussion, see Menand on the humanities and philosophy's relation to other disciplines) But suffice to say that in my experience, Anglo-American philosophers often see eye to eye more with their colleagues in the natural or social sciences than with those in literature, history, or the arts. With the humanities imperiled by the instrumentalist or economic growth-based approach to education whose limitations Nussbaum so vigorously criticizes, it's natural for humanities disciplines to turn against one another in the fight for scarce resources. (Nussbaum's report of a religious studies department being told that, unlike philosophy, religious studies is not 'core', exemplifies this potential antagonism. [pp. 123-24]) Shall we teach students composition or foreign languages or critical thinking? Will students study Plato, Proust, or Picasso? Such questions imply that the humanities are merely a collection of disciplines with disparate aims, as if the study of Plato, Proust, an Picasso do not serve some definable 'humanistic' aim.

Not for Profit thus leads me to conclude that the humanities — or more exactly, its practitioners — need to develop, articulate, and defend a shared vision of what the humanities are for. Nussbaum has, in my estimation, done much of this work for us, ably highlighting how democratic societies and the individuals that inhabit them flourish only when their 'technical' education is complemented by a 'civic' education. Roughly speaking, Nussbaum powerfully reminds us, in the spirit of Socrates and Aristotle, that an education that helps us achieve our ends is useless if our ends are not worth achieving or if we lack any capacity to rationally and imaginatively appraise those ends. What good is the 'American dream,' Nussbaum writes, for people with limited, imaginatively cramped dreams? (p. 137)

For humanists, we need to show greater solidarity in defending and promoting this vision. I'm thinking of solidarity both in horizontal and vertical terms. Horizontally, we philosophers working at the higher education level need to collaborate more with historians, literary theorists, and the like in other departments, showing how the humanities are indispensable, and despite our differing disciplinary methodologies and predilections, we are nevertheless allies in a common cause of humanistic education. Vertically, we need to show greater solidarity with humanities educators at the K-12 level, coming to their aid when foreign language and music programs are put on the chopping block. And we need to collaborate with the informal mechanisms of humanities education — museums, libraries, granting agencies, arts organizations, and the like — so that humanities education does not become equated with *academic* humanities education.

Now my second concern, which is more internal to philosophy as such: Philosophy's role in civic education is (unsurprisingly) most prominent in what Nussbaum sees as the development of a capacity for argument. And I share with her the belief that absent some facility for argument, students are left too easily influenced, too susceptible to the claims of authority, and hamstrung in their ability to critically engage their own beliefs and the beliefs of others. And philosophy is distinctive among humanities disciplines in highlighting the common logic of arguments and making the development of a capacity for argument an explicit aim of its pedagogy. It's thus hard to imagine any version of humanities education oriented toward what Nussbaum calls 'Socratic values' that does not include philosophy and yet expects to produce a democratic citizen: 'active, critical, curious, capable of resisting authority and peer pressure.' (p. 72)

The underside of this is that philosophy seems often to result not in improvements in students' beliefs, values, or understanding, but a kind of skepticism, bordering on nihilism. As we've discussed here at ISW before, students learning moral philosophy too often leave their studies as moderately sophisticated moral relativists. Many of my students report that philosophy is skepticism for its own sake, a set of intellectual tools to demonstrate the folly or inadequacy of various systems of belief, and as Mike once observed, it seems common for students to leave philosophy with the impression that it's all questions, no answers. I once had a teacher tell me that philosophy is "the machete of academic disciplines." An apt metaphor in some respects: Philosophy tries to cut big ideas down to size, uproot them, and then see which of them can withstand scrutiny. Yet whatever a machete's virtue at clearing the landscape, it doesn't plant seeds that lead to new growth.

My worry, then — and note that this is no criticism of Nussbaum — is that philosophy's penchant for relentless criticism too often succeeds too well in engendering skepticism in students. Democracies need skepticism, but wither from cynicism. And my suspicion is that we philosophers produce more cynics than skeptics — more reflexive, knowingly dismissive postmodern cynics with a contempt for the patient, probing search for the truth than thoughtful, humble inquirers who use argument as a tool to gain understanding and wisdom instead of the 'upper hand' in rhetorical exchanges.

So I fear that philosophy educators too often create clever citizens instead of wise ones. And this makes philosophy's role in the civic education Nussbaum defends regrettably narrow: the skeptical 'not so fast!' discipline that destroys knowledge without putting something in its place. Future discussions of how philosophy serves the humanistic ends of a democratic society should, in my estimation, think carefully about how philosophy can be constructive, instead of merely destructive.