You can skip past this section http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/879...8:56&out=22:30 where you can't hear Josh or see Josh. The diavloggers do come back to the issues John raises after the technical problems. Also, the link to Josh's paper on mind and moral cognition seems not to be working for me -- I googled it and again couldn't get it, so apparently UNC is at fault there. I hope they'll fix that. I'm still watching, so I'll come back later with something more substantive to say later. Many thanks to BloggingHeads for having another philosopher on!

For those who wonder about the very existence of Joshua's chosen field of inquiry, here is a time-saving summary:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/879...2&out=00:22:24

The sound is terrible but the subjects are fascinating. I really enjoyed Prof. Knobe and I hope he returns soon. BTW, I thought it was hilarious when Mr. Knobe pointed out the strangeness of rejecting a scientific hypothesis on the basis that it might have bad moral implications. Mr. Horgan goes on to say that this hypothesis is too much like theology. Wouldn't rejecting a scientific hypothesis on the basis of moral implications be like a theology?

Josh's experiments are interesting, but difficult to interpret when they depend on the slipperiness of language. Before we accept that Josh has constructed a controlled experiment in philosophy, we have to examine to what extent the experiment relies on the reproducibility of word meanings. Take the "Lottery/Dr. Evil" experiment. I know people who play the lottery in the full (and justified) expectation of losing. It's not simply an effort to win the jackpot. It is a form of entertainment, which provides some value for the $1, even in failure. Dr. Wright, we assume, feels more urgency about winning out against Dr. Evil, and we project the difference in intensity of feeling onto the word "intend". If "intend" has a different meaning in the two cases, this breaks the beautiful symmetry that Josh tries to construct. In the "Harm/Help the Environment" experiment, the chairman is confronted, in one case, with what appears to be a balance of good and ill. In the other case there seems to be no choice to be made. The lack of choice again colors the meaning of the word "intend", breaking the symmetry claimed between the two experiments.

Fascinating and delightful discussion which performs a ground-breaking service for all of humanity: placing both science and philosophy in proper perspective as deeply amusing excursions of the unenlightened mind, sort of like big games of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" where the guys in the labcoats party down with the fellows in tweed, the only entry requirement being some sheepskin you got somewhere. My favorite highlight: Robert Wright Defeats Dr. Evil. EW PS: John brings up the inflationary single-big-bang cul-de-sac and Steinhardt's dissatisfaction with it. Why not do an hour on that conroversy?

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/879...52&out=1:02:14 I think that remark, understood as the outcome of this wonderful philosophy experiment is actually a bit silly. OF COURSE people are pulled in different directions by free will: it is a paradox, we believe three seemingly incompatible things (determinism is true; responsibility and determinism are incompatible and that we have free will), now what do you do about that? THAT is the philosophical problem of free will. How does it help in the least to be told that maybe philosophers have been torn between rejecting one or another of these assumptions and that for some, one intuition wins out and for others another intuition wins out? You could describe scientific debates in a similar way. Josh is just describing THE PROBLEM of free will as though it were some grand result. I suspect that Josh is assuming that "abstract reasoning" is right and our reactions to particular cases just bring in some kind of instinctual reaction that we should discount. But one could equally argue that most people aren't very good at abstract thought, and even those who are do much better when they try to tie themselves down by reflecting

hi all, i'd tend to agree with josh that it's arguable that what you yourself decide "once you get back to your armchair" is relatively trivial, masturbatory, etc., but i think a "20th century" ethicist like peter singer would make a slightly different argument -- namely, everybody or 90% of everybody could be objectively/categorically wrong about fundamental issues like world hunger and/or animal rights . . . my two cents is that it's really only once you get to an ethical issue like animal rights that moves beyond humans that you can make a strong argument for rejecting global majoritarian intuitions when and if they exist (indeed they do exist vis a vis the idea that world hunger is bad, but not vis a vis the idea that, say, heterosexism is bad). i'm willing to then take the next step and say "given people's extant intuitions, we could do more good for more people by worrying about world hunger than about world heterosexism) but understandably there are a lot of people who want to reject that sort of argument entirely. (i should also say that my own familiarity is with cross-national /survey/ research rather than experiments.) del

. BTW, I thought it was hilarious when Mr. Knobe pointed out the strangeness of rejecting a scientific hypothesis on the basis that it might have bad moral implications. Mr. Horgan goes on to say that this hypothesis is too much like theology. Wouldn't rejecting a scientific hypothesis on the basis of moral implications be like a theology?

I don't think the irony of John's position was lost on either of them. But, at the end of the day I share John's concerns, especially given his long experience of interacting with many very smart people devoting their "big brains" to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Not that John and Josh's positions are mutually exclusive. John and Josh could -- and I'll bet do -- have a healthy skepticism about abstract philosophical "solutions" providing reasons to ignore or dismiss issues of a more worldly nature, like human rights. But they both could be -- and I believe are -- suspicious of people who would close their minds to philosophical insight in order to preserve a belief. I liked Josh's admission that the more he contemplates the issues the less certain he becomes of things.

The problem with free will is that it has more than one meaning, and these are confused. That is why it is a major philosophical problem. For discussion of what it means see
Our Almost Impossible Universe: Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans extraordinarily unlikely (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2006)

I like that admission, too. And I agree Mr. Horgan has a point about spending too much brain power on these untestable and unknowable questions. The whole exchage was full of self contridiction - yet delightful.

Quoting R. Mirman: The problem with free will is that it has more than one meaning, and these are confused. That is why it is a major philosophical problem. For discussion of what it means see
Our Almost Impossible Universe: Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans extraordinarily unlikely (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2006)

For discussion of what R. Mirman's book means, see here.

I think the most fascinating, if rather discouraging, aspect of the harm/good study is not that we assign blame for collateral and avoidable damage, but that we withhold credit for collateral and unintended good. I’d be interested to see the non-zero-sum adherents’ explanation for such behavior. We’re a parsimonious lot. And given the talent our species has for deceiving others and ourselves as to our intentions, associated with the high cost back in the day of getting one’s assessment of another hunter/gatherer’s intentions wrong, it should surprise few that the bar for awarding credit is much higher than that for assigning blame. Better to err on the side of caution was surely the motto of our ancestors. I don't think experimental philosophy told us anything here we did not already know though studies in evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics. I am inclined to believe that we should use the same standard, whatever it may be, for awarding credit and assigning blame. To do otherwise strikes me as somehow hypocritical. There is something about the desire to withhold credit from someone who causes a collateral good consequence that is just

Quoting del: hi all,

i'd tend to agree with josh that it's arguable that what you yourself decide "once you get back to your armchair" is relatively trivial, masturbatory, etc., del

I don't recall him saying that.
Anyway, trivial from whose point of view? Other people may not care much whether my views are consistent (especially those views I can't help but hold -- e.g., I am conscious, I have free will etc.). But I might care. If the question is a moral one, I have a responsibility to figure it out. Also, I think the switch to the third person perspective is precisely what permits the cop out. It's plenty easy to imagine that no one ELSE is conscious -- they're all amazingly convincing automata -- but it's not so easy to believe you aren't conscious. Nor is it easy to act from the point of view that you have no real choice about how to act. And further, there's always the problem of how to interpret the experiments. As Simon and I both point out, they don't really interpret themselves. The "armchair" comes along when you have to figure out whether the experiment reveals something about the concept under discussion (free will or intention) or only about

hi bloggin,
i think you have a good point against singer about competing intutions but he himself is pretty explicit in his critique of intutionism -- see intro/ch. 1 of PRACTICAL ETHICS and/or ch. 5 of ONE WORLD. i may also be connecting dots that josh isn't connecting based on the slate and NYT links, but i was mainly working off the part where he says that the question of "what intention means to you" is less important than how we as human beings in general go about thinking about intentionality. (plus we can at least agree that he's less "pro-armchairs" than you, correct?) anyway, to avoid any third-person cop-outs i'll observe that in teaching poli sci students i've found it's far easier to get students interested in playing philosopher-kings than it is in consulting the moral intuitions of the demos . . . while they take their armchair philosophizing seriously and inevitably find it superior to aristotle's "wisdom of the multitude" i often wish they'd take themselves less seriously (hence, i suppose, a personal bias in favor of majoritarianism).
all best, del

Great diavlog John and Josh. I’ve got a comment/question about XPhi, however. Experiments in psychology (and other sciences) are interesting when the results are at least somewhat surprising – i.e., not something one would obviously expect, or maybe even think of, from a description of the experiment alone. The experimental procedures Josh described (i.e., the various stories told to subjects, and the questions asked) are indeed very interesting, but the results of the experiments are not particularly surprising given an initial description of the experimental procedures. Given descriptions, e.g., of the two conditions with the chairman of the board just wanting to make money, and adopting policies that will either harm or help the environment, we get our own, quite strong intuitions about whether the chairman of the board acted intentionally or not; and the results of the experiment (i.e., running the subjects, doing the statistics, etc.) just confirm our own judgments/intuitions about what to say about the two cases. The description of the two cases itself, along with the question about whether the chairman of the board acted intentionally, is undoubtedly a brilliant philosophical thought experiment which shows something quite surprising about how our folk psychological

Josh seems to regard it as a surprising result of his experiments that we have the intuitions we have but do not know why we make the distinctions we do. He seems to assume that previous philosophers assumed that once you had an intuition about a particular case you must fully understand it. It does seem that some intuitionist philosophers writing as late as the middle of the last century went a long way in this direction. But I don't think many philosophers before XPhi came along would have been very startled by the fact that our intutions about particular cases don't come with ready-made explanations -- any more than our linguistic intuitions do. (Think of the linguistic intuitions Steven Pinker begins _The Language of Thought_ with. Why can you say both "I loaded the wagon with hay" and "I loaded hay into the wagon", but you can't say both "I poured milk into the glass" and "I poured the glass with milk". We know what we can say, but we need somebody to do a lot of thinking to explain why we can say this and

Quoting del: hi bloggin,
i think you have a good point against singer about competing intutions but he himself is pretty explicit in his critique of intutionism -- see intro/ch. 1 of PRACTICAL ETHICS and/or ch. 5 of ONE WORLD. i may also be connecting dots that josh isn't connecting based on the slate and NYT links, but i was mainly working off the part where he says that the question of "what intention means to you" is less important than how we as human beings in general go about thinking about intentionality. (plus we can at least agree that he's less "pro-armchairs" than you, correct?) anyway, to avoid any third-person cop-outs i'll observe that in teaching poli sci students i've found it's far easier to get students interested in playing philosopher-kings than it is in consulting the moral intuitions of the demos . . . while they take their armchair philosophizing seriously and inevitably find it superior to aristotle's "wisdom of the multitude" i often wish they'd take themselves less seriously (hence, i suppose, a personal bias in favor of majoritarianism).
all best, del

Hi del,
I don't have those books of Singer's at hand, but normally "intuitionism" is not simply any

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Josh seems to regard it as a surprising result of his experiments that we have the intuitions we have but do not know why we make the distinctions we do.

Yes, I'm sure Josh regards it as surprising that we have the intuitions we do upon hearing the stories and being asked whether the chairman of the board harmed/helped the environment intentionally. I agree that it's surprising. It's after all common to think of intention as a kind of mental state that is independent of the types of moral considerations Josh's thought experiments inject into the mix. But my point is that it's very unclear (at least to me) what running subjects, analyzing the data, etc. is supposed to contribute here. In the diavlog, after all, Josh described the cases, and we all saw pretty clearly that our pattern of intuitive judgments reveals something surprising and interesting about our concept of intentional action (specifically, regarding the way it's related to certain moral concepts). This point could have been made to BhTV viewers without any talk of empirical experiments at all -- as is the case with philosophical thought

Hi Bloggin,
It's interesting that you mention Joshua Greene because while I agree with his conclusions I had a similar reaction to his tone in an NPR interview I heard. Re the possibility of eliminating intuitions entirely and such, I think there's considerable interest in rational cogitation and intuition being different brain functions . . . I found the below NYT article by Pinker kind of rambly, but if you didn't see it it covers some of that research in the context of the Trolley Problem specifically (not sure link will work but you can Google "The Moral Instinct". My personal sense is that there's probably some distribution of cogitating/intuiting among individuals and that Singer's on one end of it: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/ma...=1&oref=slogin Best,
Del

But my point is that it's very unclear (at least to me) what running subjects, analyzing the data, etc. is supposed to contribute here. In the diavlog, after all, Josh described the cases, and we all saw pretty clearly that our pattern of intuitive judgments reveals something surprising and interesting about our concept of intentional action (specifically, regarding the way it's related to certain moral concepts). This point could have been made to BhTV viewers without any talk of empirical experiments at all -- as is the case with philosophical thought experiments generally.

Appaih, who was Knobe's professor, seems to (almost) concede this point in his NYT article:

The best work in experimental philosophy would be valuable and suggestive even if it skipped the actual experiments. ... X-phi helps keep us honest and enforces a useful modesty about how much weight to give one’s personal hunches, even when they’re shared by the guy in the next office. But — this is my own empirical observation — although experiments can illuminate philosophical arguments, they don’t settle them.
.... You can conduct more research to try to clarify matters, but you’re left having to interpret the findings; they don’t interpret themselves. There

You seem to feel we disagree more than I think we do. I find the passages from my posts that you quote rather horribly written now that I see them excerpted, so I can see how I could have been pretty unclear.

But my point is that it's very unclear (at least to me) what running subjects, analyzing the data, etc. is supposed to contribute here. In the diavlog, after all, Josh described the cases, and we all saw pretty clearly that our pattern of intuitive judgments reveals something surprising and interesting about our concept of intentional action (specifically, regarding the way it's related to certain moral concepts).

I don't want to deny that the conflict among our intuitions and the fact that we don't automatically know how to explain these conflicts is surprising to someone. My point is that as a general matter such conflicts and our need to theorize about them after the fact (as opposed to simply "intuiting" the explanation) should NOT be suprising to anyone who knows anything about thehistory of philosophy back to Socrates. The particular thought experiments in question may be new -- though Anthony Appiah in _Experiments in

Hi Bloggin, Although I've got a Strong Intuition that there is much agreement between us, I still feel as if I haven't succeeded in getting a few of my points across to you. So I'll try again.

I don't want to deny that the conflict among our intuitions and the fact that we don't automatically know how to explain these conflicts is surprising to someone.

I don't think that the fact that we don't know how to explain the conflicting intuitions between the two cases in Knobe's thought experiment is what's surprising. The fact that we don't know how to readily explain them is part of what makes the thought experiment an interesting thought experiment. What's surprising, I think, is the conflict of intuitions itself, given that one naturally would have thought that whether or not one acts intentionally is independent of (e.g.) any moral features of an act’s consequences. Similarly, with Gettier cases, what's surprising is the intuition that people in the examples don't have knowledge, in spite of the fact that they have justified true beliefs. The fact that we lack a good theory to account for the intuitions

Quoting mvantony:
My main point, Bloggin, has been that it's not clear to me what the need is for running subjects at all. It would have been enough, it seems to me, to just write a paper describing the two cases with the chairman of the board either hurting or helping the environment, pointing out that in only one of the cases there's a strong intuition that the chairman acted intentionally, and then discussing what the implications of all this are -- as is done with philosophical thought experiments generally.

Yes, I agree. I see the philosophical process as JUST BEGINNING with this kind of surprising clash of cases. When we have a real puzzle it's because the clash arrises WITHIN ONE PERSON. Even if the problem doesn't arise for others in quite the same way, that person must reflect on what's going on with his conceptual scheme. (Many of Plato's problems have to be translated for us moderns, since we don't have quite the same intuitions about virtue -- and yet something like the same problems arise if we put them in more modern terms.) This is why I focus on the splitting up part of

I thought it was interesting, after saying that it was logical, if there is no free will, to not punish someone who does a crime, he goes on to say that it then makes most sense to give the impression that you would punish someone. He did not say anything to justify that claim. He just brought in this new element of how it's best to prevent crime out of nowhere. I just thought it was him showing, at least in this case, that his final conclusion is based more on his own feelings than actually following logically from his previous statements. At least that's how I saw it.

I really think Joshua ought to replace that armchair his friends burnt and read up some moral philosophy. Ans I really, really think he should be careful about speculating about ethics using highly speculative physics--to the point that it is not clear any more that it is physics--while making utterly inappropriate metaphysical assumptions. Experimental Philosophy: back to Hume?