Weiye Loh's Library tagged X-Phi → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

Experimental Philosophy: A Modest Proposal

X-Phi is a branch of psychology that specializes in how the mind actually works when we make judgments about philosophically interesting topics.

experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/...a-modest-proposal.html

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X-Phi Psychology Science

philosophers, especially prior to the 20^th century, did make claims about how the mind actually works, so this is actually just a return to the classical tradition. (There may also be an underlying narrative of progress: put in my terms, the suggestion is that philosophy has always been psychology, but only now it is done properly and scientifically.) Behind this response, there may be a causal hypothesis: certain misguided developments within philosophy (maybe Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl) led to an aberration that has now finally run its course.
It is true, of course, that many philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche did make claims about how the mind actually works. (Though I’d be surprised to learn they had an interest in folk classification.) But then Aristotle made all sorts of biological claims, too, and pioneered just about any other empirical discipline as well, Descartes worked on optics and geometry, Kant wrote about astronomy, and so on. No one would now say that they were doing philosophy when they did so (though at the time they may have seen no significant difference between their various projects, and all their work would have been then labelled as philosophy). Why? Because we can see now, in retrospect, that these are issues that are best settled with empirical evidence. Psychology was among the last sciences to gain independence from philosophy in the 19^th century; that is the real reason why only 20^th century philosophers needed to and were able to distinguish their own project from psychology, not the emergence of some misguided doctrine. But that is not to say that we can’t trace the non-empirical and non-psychological questions and methods back to earlier work, and see that they form the core of what the people we now regard as great philosophers did.
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- there are first-order, traditional philosophical questions, the questions that draw most people into the discipline, that cannot be answered by studying how the mind actually works. Here’s just a few examples: Is free will compatible with determinism? Which changes will I survive? Why is there something rather than nothing? Which patterns of inference are entitlement-preserving? Are there objective moral truths? Why and when should I obey the law? There are also second-order, methodological cum epistemological questions: How can we discover whether free will is compatible with determinism? What is evidence for or against the existence of objective moral truths or irreducible phenomenal states? These questions, too, are non-psychological. They’re not about how the folk categorize things and why. It is only if we give certain optional substantive answers to these second-order questions that such psychological facts (or other kinds of empirical facts) become philosophically relevant.

Jun

2011

In Search of the True Self - NYTimes.com

How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-search-of-the-true-self

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Self-Reflexivity Philosophy Homosexuality X-Phi

This answer, endorsed by numerous different philosophers in different ways, says that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values. Take the person fighting an addiction to heroin. She might have a continual craving for another fix, but if she just gives in to this craving, it would be absurd to say that she is thereby “being true to herself” or “expressing the person she really is.” On the contrary, she is betraying herself and giving up what she values most. This sort of approach gives us a straightforward answer in a case like Mark Pierpont’s. It says that his sexual desires are not the real him. If he loses control and gives in to these desires, he will be betraying his true self.
when I mention this view to people outside the world of philosophy, they often seem stunned that anyone could ever believe it. They are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression. To find a moment when a person’s true self comes out, they think, one needs to look at the times when people are so drunk or overcome by passion that they are unable to suppress what is deep within them. This view, too, yields a straightforward verdict in a case like Pierpont’s. It says that his sexual desires are what is most fundamental to him, and to the extent that he is restraining them, he is not revealing the person he really is.
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- In my view, neither of these two perspectives fully captures the concept of a true self. The trouble is that both of them assume that the true self can be identified in some straightforward way with one particular part of a person’s psychology. But it seems that the matter is more complex. People’s ordinary understanding of the true self appears to involve a kind of value judgment, a judgment about what sorts of lives are really worth living. So people will tend to arrive at different judgments regarding the nature of Pierpont’s self depending on whether they think that a homosexual lifestyle truly is a valuable one.
- Conservative participants were more inclined to say that the person’s true self had emerged on the conservative items, while liberals were more inclined to say that the person’s true self had emerged on the liberal items.
- Further research is needed, and the truth is bound to be quite a bit more complex than it might at first appear. Still, the findings do seem to point to an interesting new question. Does our ordinary notion of a “true self” simply pick out a certain part of the mind? Or is this notion actually wrapped up in some inextricable way with our own values and ideals?

Apr

2011

Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice - NYTimes.com

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion — a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

www.nytimes.com/...22tier.html

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X-Phi Philosophy Free Will

1) In this deterministic universe, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for his actions?
2) This year, as he has often done in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is he fully morally responsible for his actions?
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- 3) Bill falls in love with his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to murder his wife and three children. Before leaving on a trip, he arranges for them to be killed while he is away. Is Bill fully morally responsible for his actions?
- To a classic philosopher, these are just three versions of the same question about free will. But to the new breed of philosophers who test people’s responses to concepts like determinism, there are crucial differences, as Shaun Nichols explains in the current issue of Science.
- Most respondents will absolve the unspecified person in Question 1 from full responsibility for his actions, and a majority will also give Mark a break for his tax chiseling. But not Bill. He’s fully to blame for his heinous crime, according to more than 70 percent of the people queried by Dr. Nichols, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona, and his Yale colleague Joshua Knobe.
- Is Bill being judged illogically? In one way, yes. The chain of reasoning may seem flawed to some philosophers, and the belief in free will may seem naïve to the psychologists and neuroscientists who argue that we’re driven by forces beyond our conscious control — an argument that Bill’s lawyer might end up borrowing in court.
- But in another way it makes perfect sense to hold Bill fully accountable for murder. His judges pragmatically intuit that regardless of whether free will exists, our society depends on everyone’s believing it does. The benefits of this belief have been demonstrated in other research showing that when people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest.
- In one experiment, some people read a passage from Francis Crick, the molecular biologist, asserting that free will is a quaint old notion no longer taken seriously by intellectuals, especially not psychologists and neuroscientists. Afterward, when compared with a control group that read a different passage from Crick (who died in 2004) these people expressed more skepticism about free will — and promptly cut themselves some moral slack while taking a math test.
- “Doubting one’s free will may undermine the sense of self as agent,” Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler concluded. “Or, perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”
- “Free will guides people’s choices toward being more moral and better performers,” Dr. Vohs said. “It’s adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes.”
- That belief seems to persist no matter where people grow up, as experimental philosophers have discovered by querying adults in different cultures, including Hong Kong, India, Colombia and the United States. Whatever their cultural differences, people tend to reject the notion that they live in a deterministic world without free will.
- They also tend to agree, across cultures, that a hypothetical person in a hypothetically deterministic world would not be responsible for his sins. This same logic explains why they they’ll excuse Mark’s tax evasion, a crime that doesn’t have an obvious victim. But that logic doesn’t hold when people are confronted with what researchers call a “high-affect” transgression, an emotionally upsetting crime like Bill’s murder of his family.

Experimental Philosophy and the Problem of Free Will

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.

www.sciencemag.org/...1401.abstract

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X-Phi Philosophy Free Will