In this article, I begin with Felski and Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the overabundance of critique in education, connecting this to Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski’s calls for a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. Rather than offering a critique of critique, I aim to think differently about the ‘uses’ of reading, taking my cue from post-critical scholarship as well as from Calvino’s experimental novel, Invisible Cities. First, I discuss how critique and post-critique differ in their orientations when engaging with a text. I argue that, instead (...) of ‘shutting down’ a text to point to its latent assumptions, post-critique opens the text up to the world by cultivating new perceptual and imaginative dimensions in our experience. This partly involves the reader being oriented towards what is worth preserving in a text—an approach that is also central to post-critical pedagogy. Second, I reflect on my own failures with respect to putting a post-critical analysis into words, since it seems that in the context of academic writing, it is difficult to avoid critique. Given this, I argue that it is more fruitful to explore three post-critical pedagogical gestures in Invisible Cities: namely, its tensions (which encourage and resist linear explanations), its fundamental but playful ambiguity (which invites both puzzlement and curiosity), and its transformative potential in relation to the everyday understandings of the cities we inhabit. These gestures encourage readers to surrender themselves to the text in a mood characterized by enchantment rather than suspicion and demonstrate to the educative potential of literature beyond critique. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo1 pretende evidenciar as características do livro-álbum pós-moderno, concretamente, na obra de Anthony Browne, criador britânico de reconhecido valor na conformação deste segmento privilegiado da edição infantojuvenil contemporânea, cuja narrativização resulta da relação triádica texto-imagem-suporte. A revisitação do conjunto da sua obra, a partir de um corpus necessariamente restrito e mais representativo, propõe evidenciar as potencialidades estético-literárias e formativas de uma produção sui generis, reconhecendo o seu contributo na consolidação de um novo paradigma da literatura para a infância. (...) Partindo de anteriores investigações em torno das recentes tendências do livro-álbum, com destaque para teorizações relativas aos conceitos de intertextualidade e metaficcionalidade - estratégias fundadoras da “escrita” do autor apreciado -, observam-se procedimentos formais, retórico-estilísticos e ideotemáticos numa leitura dialógica das componentes verbal e visual, concluindo-se acerca das suas exigências ao nível da receção, bem como do seu impacto na educação literária, crítica e reflexiva dos seus destinatários preferenciais, embora não exclusivos. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the literature on experimental political philosophy. Much of the literature considers individuals’ intuitions about distributive justice, retributive justice, and key concepts such as the doing/allowing distinction. The chapter argues that although there is relatively little experimental political philosophy proper, there are many avenues for future research. It presumes some familiarity with political philosophy, but its main aim is not to explain the relevance of studies to particular debates. The chapter provides an overview of interesting empirical results that (...) may be of some broad interest and suggests that there is reason for those interested in experimental political philosophy to do new kinds of empirical work and employ new methods from many disciplines. Experimental philosophy need not model itself primarily on the discipline of psychology. There are many useful methods available for answering important questions experimental philosophers might want to address in these other disciplines. (shrink)

Investigating experimental and avant-garde works of art as literature, Gilbert probes what art can't see about the literary and what literature has overlooked in the arts.

The experimental philosophy of law is a recent movement that aims to inform traditional debates in jurisprudence by conducting empirical research. This paper introduces and provides a systematic overview of the main lines of research in this field. It also covers the most important debates in the literature regarding the implications of these findings for the philosophy and theory of law. It argues that three challenges arise when addressing (old) legal-philosophical questions in (new) experimental ways by drawing normative implications from (...) empirical data: such implications are value-driven, depend on explanations of empirical findings and vary across legal systems. (shrink)

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive (...) ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments. (shrink)

In relatively recent years, quite a number of diverse case studies concerning the use of visual displays—such as graphs, diagrams, tables, pictures, drawings, etc.—in both the physical and biological sciences have been offered in the literature of the history and philosophy of science —see, e.g., Miller 1984; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Baigrie 1996; Pauwels 2006. These case studies have shown that visual representations fulfill important functions in both the theoretical and experimental practices of science, thereby emphasizing the non-verbal dimension of (...) scientific inquiry that had been neglected by the traditional language-based conception of science, which takes the production, justification and... (shrink)

The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the existing empirical evidence seems to support the view that most people have compatibilist (...) intuitions. (shrink)

This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the (...) compatibility question, but that their general approach suffers from significant practical and philosophical difficulties. Section 4 reviews experimental work addressing other aspects of the free will/moral responsibility debate, and section 5 concludes with a discussion of avenues for further research. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

One view of philosophy that is sometimes expressed, especially by scientists, is that while philosophers are good at asking questions, they are poor at producing convincing answers. And the perceived divide between philosophical and scientific methods is often pointed to as the major culprit behind this lack of progress. Looking back at the history of philosophy, however, we find that this methodological divide is a relatively recent invention. Further, it is one that has been challenged over the past decade by (...) the modern incarnation of experimental philosophy. How might the reincorporation of empirical methods into philosophy aid the process of making philosophical progress? Building off of the work of Sytsma (2010), we argue that one way it does so is by offering a means of resolving some disputes that arise in philosophy. We illustrate how philosophical disputes may sometimes be resolved empirically by looking at the recent experimental literature on intuitions about reference. (shrink)

Where should experimental economics go next? This paper uses the literature on inequity aversion as a case study in suggesting that we could profit from tightening up our act.

In today’s age, we see the increasing influence of technology on people, which begs to raise the question: “Is society determined by technology?” Rising up within the constraints of each society, technology had its limitations, as it catered to the needs and interests of the masses. As society evolved, so did its requirements. We are at a stage where dependence on technology has gone through the roof with new innovations coming up in the sector, the rise of artificial intelligence, for (...) instance. Technology has replaced the concept of being a mere tool and is creating/demanding space of its own. With advancements in various fields like robotics which churn out machines that can mimic human behaviour and are equipped with anthropomorphic features, it has become rather difficult to view them as mere commodities waiting for one’s (human master’s) command. Keeping this in view, the paper primarily focuses on the relationship between society and technology, with special emphasis on artificial intelligence, through an analysis of the films Ra One (Bollywood), Android Kunjappan (Mollywood), and Ironman 3 (Hollywood). Secondarily, an experimental study was carried out to know the perception of the Engineering students, the future technologists, who are the stakeholders of the 21st-century technological world, with an aim to know their perception of technology and bring an awareness of the limitations of technology and its role in the creation of utopian and dystopian world. Finally, the paper examines the consequence of technological determinism and autonomy from a colonial perspective and intends to bring preparedness among the students to perceive technology conscious of its limitation and bring harmony between society and technology that leads towards building a utopian world. (shrink)

Rogers canvases the literature critical of recent experiments, adding new criticisms of her own. She argues these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom and lists ethical and practical problems facing the attempt to study free will experimentally.

The standard view of pains among philosophers today holds that their existence consists in being experienced, such that there can be no unfelt pains or pain hallucinations. The typical line of support offered for this view is that it corresponds with the ordinary or commonsense conception of pain. Despite this, a growing body of evidence from experimental philosophers indicates that the ordinary understanding of pain stands in contrast to the standard view among philosophers. In this paper, we will survey this (...) literature and add to it, detailing the results of seven new studies on the ordinary understanding of pain using both corpus analysis and questionnaire methods. (shrink)

This book takes a novel approach by highlighting comparative and long-term historical perspectives on experimental practice. The juxtaposition of accounts of natural, social, and medical experimentation is very enlightening, especially because the authors put the emphasis on the different kinds of objects of experimentation (physical matter, chemical reagents, social groups, organizations, sick individuals, archeological remains) and demonstrate how much the kinds of objects matter for the practice of experimentation, its methods, tools, and methodologies. Taken together, the chapters raise several fascinating (...) questions for further study: What do these different approaches have in common? Why do we call them “experimentation”? What are the intersections among the fields and their developments? The volume engages philosophical approaches that are not well known to Anglophone readers (Bachelard, Bergson, Bernard, Canguilhem, among others) and brings to attention a wealth of Francophone secondary literature on past and present scientific experimentation. The collection fills a yawning gap in science, science studies, and philosophy of science teaching, making it particularly valuable philosophers and historians of science in all subfields. (shrink)

This chapter reviews some faults of the theoretical literature and findings from the experimental literature on “Gettier” cases. Some “Gettier” cases are so poorly constructed that they are unsuitable for serious study. Some longstanding assumptions about how people tend to judge “Gettier” cases are false. Some “Gettier” cases are judged similarly to paradigmatic ignorance, whereas others are judged similarly to paradigmatic knowledge, rendering it a theoretically useless category. Experimental procedures can affect how people judge “Gettier” cases. Some important central tendencies (...) in judging “Gettier” cases appear to be robust against demographic variation in biological sex, age, language, and culture, although there could be some interesting differences related to culture and personality traits. Some remaining questions regarding Gettier’s cases, “Gettier” cases, and “the Gettier problem” concern the psychology and sociology of contemporary anglophone theoretical epistemology. Some remaining questions regarding the empirical study of knowledge judgments concern mechanisms underlying observed behavioral patterns. (shrink)

Experimental results can in principle undermine the procedures of any intellectual community, by revealing patterns of variation in its members’ judgments that are hard to reconcile with the supposition that those judgments are even moderately reliable. Armchair philosophy typically involves the evaluation of constant stimuli, such as the scenario of a thought experiment, often presented by a written description, so in that respect Shanteau’s paper is encouraging. Jonathan Weinberg does not attempt to specify the psychological or social nature of armchair (...) philosophy. Jonathan M. Weinberg, Chad Gonnerman, Cameron Buckner, and Joshua Alexander describe the target of the experimentalist critique as “analytic philosophy’s longstanding practice of deploying armchair intuitive judgments about cases”. WGBA do try to identify some relevant differences between thought experiments and other cognitive tasks in philosophy in terms drawn from the scientific literature on expertise. The phrase “experimental philosophy” can mean many things. (shrink)

Using a variety of different results from the literature, I show how causal discovery with experiments is limited unless substantive assumptions about the underlying causal structure are made. These results undermine the view that experiments, such as randomized controlled trials, can independently provide a gold standard for causal discovery. Moreover, I present a concrete example in which causal underdetermination persists despite exhaustive experimentation and argue that such cases undermine the appeal of an interventionist account of causation as its dependence on (...) other assumptions is not spelled out. (shrink)

We investigate experimentally the relationship between risk and incentives in a principal–agent setting. In contrast to the existing empirical literature that describes such relationship as ‘tenuous’ or inconclusive, we find a clear negative relationship—supporting the prediction of the standard theoretical model. Specifically, we find that principals reduce the size of the offered piece rates with an increase in risk and instead provide positive fixed wages. Furthermore, we find no relationship between the variance in the performance and the effort choice of (...) the agent, and a strong positive relationship between the effort choice of the agents and the offered piece rates as well as fixed wage, suggesting positive reciprocity. Finally, we find evidence of social projection by the principals regarding the agents’ degree of risk aversion. (shrink)

Recently, game theory and evolutionary game theory - mathematical frameworks from economics and biology designed to model and explain interactive behavior - have proved fruitful tools for philosophers in areas such as ethics, philosophy of language, social epistemology, and political philosophy. This methodological osmosis is part of a trend where philosophers have blurred disciplinary lines to import the best epistemic tools available. In this vein, experimental philosophers have drawn on practices from the social sciences, and especially from psychology, to expand (...) philosophy's grasp on issues from morality to consciousness. We argue that the recent prevalence of formal work on human interaction in philosophy opens the door for new methods in experimental philosophy. In particular, we discuss methods from experimental economics, focusing on a small literature we have been developing investigating signaling and communication in humans. We describe results from a novel experiment showing how environmental structure can shape signaling behavior. (shrink)

This chapter reviews and then criticizes the dominant approach that experimental philosophers have adopted in their studies on free will and moral responsibility. Section “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will” reviews the experimental literature and the shared approach: probing for intuitions about the so-called compatibility question, whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Section “The Intervention” argues that this experimental focus on the compatibility question is fundamentally misguided. The critique develops in the form of a dialogue: a staged “intervention” for (...) an experimental philosopher who works on free will. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the literature can move in a more fruitful direction. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §1 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, and natural theology, on the other. §2 (...) offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it’s important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §3 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed? (shrink)

Some three score years ago, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess found himself dissatisfied with “what are called ‘theories of truth’ in philosophical literature.” “The discussion has already lasted some 2500 years,” he wrote. “The number of participants amounts to a thousand, and the number of articles and books devoted to the discussion is much greater.” In this great ocean of words, he went on, the philosophers had often made bold statements about what “the man in the street” or “Das Volk” (...) or “la conscience humaine” made of truth or Wahrheit or vérité. And Naess had a few simple questions about these claims: “How do the philosophers know these things? What is the source of their knowledge? What have they done to arrive at it? … their writings,” he complained, “contain almost nothing of this matter.”1 And so Naess began the research that resulted in the publication in 1938 of his first book in English: “Truth” As Conceived By Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers. (shrink)

We agree with Branigan & Pickering that structural priming experiments should supplant grammaticality judgments for testing linguistic representation. However, B&P overlook a vast linguistic literature that converges with – but extends – the experimental findings. B&P conclude that syntax is functionally independent of the lexicon. We argue that a broader approach to priming reveals cracks in the façade of syntactic autonomy.

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal(individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general (...) theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual andsituation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature concerning scientific experimentation, the notion of robustness has been solely discussed in relation to experimental results. In this paper, I propose a novel sense of experimental robustness that applies to experimental procedures. I call the foregoing sense of robustness procedure robustness and characterize it as the capacity of an experimental procedure to maintain its intended function invariant during the experimental process despite possible variations in its inputs. I argue that PR is a precondition for what I (...) call result robustness, which refers to the traditional sense of experimental robustness, namely the existence of convergent experimental results obtained through different and independent means of detection. Furthermore, I argue, PR and RR constitute useful experimental strategies in the context of high-energy physics experiments, but these strategies are not without limitations. (shrink)

This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall (...) growing trend in publications in experimental philosophy, encompassing four developmental stages. Second, it found that significant changes in topics of interest have taken place, with some gaining increasing attention, others seemingly going out of fashion, and still others remaining popular constantly. Third, the study identified lists of leading philosophers, frequently cited publications, and popular journals helpful for researchers and newcomers to get a quick start in learning about the field. (shrink)

Ausgehend von den Rändern der gegenwärtigen literarischen Praxis wirft Annette Gilberts komparatistische Studie neues Licht auf eine zentrale Kategorie der Literatur(wissenschaft): das Werk als pragmatische Instanz literarischer Kommunikation. Unter Anwendung eines erweiterten Literaturbegriffs werden avantgardistische und experimentelle Positionen im Grenzbereich von Literatur und Kunst seit den 1950er Jahren gesichtet, die eine starke Reflexion ihres eigenen Werkseins erkennen lassen. Entsprechende Versuchsanordnungen - etwa von Elfriede Jelinek, Timm Ulrichs, Sherrie Levine, Elaine Sturtevant, Marcel Broodthaers - werden als substantieller Beitrag zur literaturtheoretischen Grundlagenforschung (...) gelesen. Zugleich werden Traditionslinien zu historischen Vorgängern wie Stéphane Mallarmé und Jorge Luis Borges sowie Parallelen zu ähnlichen Tendenzen und Problemstellungen in der bildenden Kunst aufgezeigt. (shrink)

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal(individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general (...) theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual andsituation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination. (shrink)

Recent replication crises in psychology and other fields have led to intense reflection about the validity of common research practices. Much of this reflection has focussed on reporting standards, and how they may be related to the questionable research practices that could underlie a high proportion of irreproducible findings in the published record. As a developing field, it is particularly important for Experimental Philosophy to avoid some of the pitfalls that have beset other disciplines. To this end, here we provide (...) a detailed, comprehensive assessment of current reporting practices in Experimental Philosophy. We focus on the quality of statistical reporting and the disclosure of information about study methodology. We assess all the articles using quantitative methods that were published over the years 2013–2016 in 29 leading philosophy journals. We find that null hypothesis significance testing is the prevalent statistical practice in Experimental Philosophy, although relying solely on this approach has been criticised in the psychological literature. To augment this approach, various additional measures have become commonplace in other fields, but we find that Experimental Philosophy has adopted these only partially: 53% of the papers report an effect size, 28% confidence intervals, 1% examined prospective statistical power and 5% report observed statistical power. Importantly, we find no direct relation between an article’s reporting quality and its impact. We conclude with recommendations for authors, reviewers and editors in Experimental Philosophy, to facilitate making research statistically-transparent and reproducible. (shrink)

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering--which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil--is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. We might immediately find ourselves wondering why (and how!) something so universal might be understood in so many different ways. Why does suffering push (...) some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The primary aim of this paper is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. Finally, in the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of research practices typical of experimental philosophy. To that end, it presents a review of methodological issues that have proved crucial to the quality of research in the biobehavioral sciences. It discusses various shortcomings in the experimental philosophy literature related to (1) the credibility of self-report questionnaires, (2) the validity and reliability of measurement, (3) the adherence to appropriate procedures for sampling, random assignment, and handling of participants, and (4) the meticulousness of study reporting. It (...) argues that the future standing of experimental philosophy will hinge upon improvements in research methods. (shrink)

Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that (...) uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n. (shrink)

A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as _Angie is allowed to buy the boat or the car_, gives rise to the free choice inference that Angie can freely choose between the two. This inference poses a well-known puzzle, in that it is not predicted by a standard treatment of modals and disjunction (e.g., Kamp (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74:57–74, 1974 )). To complicate things further, free choice tends to disappear under negation: _Angie is (...) not allowed to buy the boat or the car_ doesn’t merely convey the negation of free choice, but rather the stronger double prohibition reading that Angie cannot buy either one. There are two main approaches to the free choice - double prohibition pattern in the literature. While they both capture the relevant data points, they make a testable, divergent prediction regarding the status of positive and negative sentences in a context in which Angie can only buy one of the two objects, e.g., the boat. In particular, the implicature-based approach (e.g., Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, pp. 71–120, 2007 ); Klinedinst (Plurality and possibility, PhD diss., UCLA, 2007 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Proceedings of SALT 27, pp. 95–115, 2017 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Natural Language Semantics 28:175–223, 2020 )) predicts that the positive sentence is true in such a context, but associated with a false implicature, while it predicts the negative sentence to be straightforwardly false. The homogeneity-based approach in Goldstein (Semantics & Pragmatics 12:1–53, 2019 ) predicts both the positive and negative sentences to be equally undefined (see also Aloni (Semantics & Pragmatics 15:5, 2022 ); Willer (Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, pp. 511–520, 2017 )) for similar predictions). Investigating the contrast between these sentences in such a context therefore provides a clear way to address the debate between implicature and non-implicature accounts of free choice. We present a set of four experiments aiming to do just this, by comparing free choice inferences to regular implicatures, using a ternary judgment task. The results overall present a challenge for the implicature approach. We discuss how the implicature approach could be amended to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard and Chemla (Linguistics & Philosophy 44:79–112, 2021 ) on the distribution of implicatures. (shrink)

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental findings, addressing three central questions: What is it to read empathically? Does reading make us more empathic? What characteristics of literature, if (...) any, affect readers’ empathy? While experimental studies have delivered no conclusive answers to these questions, it has exposed their psychological complexity and constructed a more nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which literature interacts with our empathic capacities. (shrink)

Shames' article ingeniously attempts to impeach arguments which support the view that a psychologist's experimental results are significantly influenced by the experimenter expectancy effect. This attack is a powerful one in which Shames unveils his “expectancy paradox”: the scientist investigating the influence of the expectancy effect in psychology remains himself subject to any such expectancy effect. Therefore, he argues, “The more substantial is the evidence for the veridicality of experimenter expectancy... the more suspect it becomes...”. Shames maintains that this paradox (...) is inescapable only if the experimenter expectancy effect is inexorable in any particular research program and is pervasive through the broad spectrum of psychological research. A review of the literature leads him to hold that this effect is neither inexorable nor unquestionably pervasive. “Thus,” Shames concludes, “the expectancy paradox is less pernicious than may have been feared; however, since it is so intimately tied to the experimenter expectancy effect, the spectre of doubt as to the compass of this effect is cast”. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose an account that accommodates the possibility of experimentation being exploratory in cases where the procedures necessary to plan and perform an experiment are dependent on the theoretical accounts of the phenomena under investigation. The present account suggests that experimental exploration requires the implementation of an exploratory procedure that serves to extend the range of possible outcomes of an experiment, thereby enabling it to pursue its objectives. Furthermore, I argue that the present account subsumes the notion (...) of exploratory experimentation, which is often attributed in the relevant literature to the works of Friedrich Steinle and Richard Burian, as a particular type of experimental exploration carried out in the special cases where no well-formed theoretical framework of the phenomena under investigation exists. I illustrate the present account in the context of the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the long-sought Higgs boson has been discovered in 2012. I argue that the data selection procedure carried out in the ATLAS experiment illustrates an exploratory procedure in the sense suggested by the present account. I point out that this particular data selection procedure is theory-laden in that its implementation is crucially dependent on the theoretical models of high energy particle physics which the ATLAS experiment is aimed to test. However, I argue that the foregoing procedure is not driven by the above-mentioned theoretical models, but rather by a particular data selection strategy. I conclude that the ATLAS experiment illustrates that, contrary to what previous studies have suggested, there are cases of experimentation in which exploration serves to test theoretical predictions and that theory-ladenness plays an essential role in experimentation being exploratory. (shrink)

In scientific work, sonification is primarily thought of as a novel way to communicate post hoc research findings to lay audiences but only rarely, if ever, as a component of the research itself. This article argues that, rather than any inherent epistemological limitations of sound as a medium of scientific reasoning, this framing reflects a sociohistorical tendency to “silence” experimental techniques as they become widely adopted—both in terms of the literal silencing of noisy instrumentation and the elision of the role (...) of sound in received discovery accounts. This tendency is well-illustrated by the history of electrophysiology research, particularly the case of the electrical penetration graph, an instrument used by entomologists to study how insects feed on plants. Combining participant observation, interviews, and analysis of EPG technical literature, this article recovers the unacknowledged role of sound in EPG’s exploratory stages and gradual emergence as a standard laboratory technique as well as its gradual silencing as a consequence of this standardizing process. (shrink)

How do cognitive neuroscientists explain phenomena like memory or language processing? This book examines the different kinds of experiments and manipulative research strategies involved in understanding and eventually explaining such phenomena. Against this background, it evaluates contemporary accounts of scientific explanation, specifically the mechanistic and interventionist accounts, and finds them to be crucially incomplete. Besides, mechanisms and interventions cannot actually be combined in the way usually done in the literature. This book offers solutions to both these problems based on insights (...) from experimental practice. It defends a new reading of the interventionist account, highlights the importance of non-interventionist studies for scientific inquiry, and supplies a taxonomy of experiments that makes it easy to see how the gaps in contemporary accounts of scientific explanation can be filled. The book concludes that a truly empirically adequate philosophy of science must take into account a much wider range of experimental research than has been done to date. With the taxonomy provided, this book serves a stepping-stone leading into a new era of philosophy of science—for cognitive neuroscience and beyond. (shrink)

This paper examines the origins and legacy of Titchener’s notion of stimulus error in the experimental study of sensory experience. It places Titchener’s introspective methods into the intellectual world of early experimental psychology. It follows the subsequent development of perceptual experimentation primarily in the American literature, with notice to British and German studies as needed. Subsequent investigators transformed the specific notion of a “stimulus error” into experimental questions in which subjects’ attitudes toward their perceptual tasks became independent variables to be (...) manipulated experimentally. Ultimately, these manipulations support a distinction between accessing phenomenal as opposed to cognitive aspects of subjects’ responses to perceived objects. (shrink)

This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call ‘interface judgement’, which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this (...) study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgement task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts 1995, 1996, Giannakidou 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou & Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikontantinou (2016)’s study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria & Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle ‘ere’ in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgement. (shrink)

Is it fair for employers to select candidates partly based on how the employers think customers react to the candidates' appearances, that is, based on candidates' reaction qualifications? Both philosophically (in the literature on wrongful discrimination) and empirically, this question has recently been getting attention. Here, we focus on a theory of unfair disadvantages emphasizing (i) whether the possession of the appearance feature in question reflects choices on the part of the candidate and (ii) whether the appearance feature in question (...) reflects values or convictions of importance to the candidate. We scrutinize the theory by evaluating how well these factors map on to folk intuitions about wrongful discrimination using an experimental-philosophical approach and data from the United States. We do so on the presumption that coherence with folk intuitions is one desideratum for a philosophical theory and that attention should be given to potential discrepancies between philosophical theories and folk intuitions. Our central finding is that there is only general support for factor (i), not (ii), in the American population. Our study also adds to the extant empirical literature on reaction qualifications that tend to focus on the employer's side of the matter, not the candidate's as we do. (shrink)