Markus Kneer
University of Zurich, Switzerland, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- École Normale Supérieure, Philosophy, Department Memberadd
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AI accidental Art 62 -1.05 0.300 abstract AI accidental Artist 62 -8.85 <0.001AI accidental Artist 62 -8.85 <0.001 abstract AI accidental Desire 62 -20.41 <0.001AI accidental Desire 62 -20.41 <0.001 abstract AI accidental... more
AI accidental Art 62 -1.05 0.300 abstract AI accidental Artist 62 -8.85 <0.001AI accidental Artist 62 -8.85 <0.001 abstract AI accidental Desire 62 -20.41 <0.001AI accidental Desire 62 -20.41 <0.001 abstract AI accidental Belief 62 -16.83 <0.001AI accidental Belief 62 -16.83 <0.001 abstract AI accidental Intention 62 -14.89 <0.001AI accidental Intention 62 -14.89 <0.001 abstract AI intentional Art 67 0.54 0.590AI intentional Art 67 0.54 0.590 abstract AI intentional Artist 67 -5.86 <0.001AI intentional Artist 67 -5.86 <0.001 abstract AI intentional Desire 67 -2.93 0.010AI intentional Desire 67 -2.93 0.010 abstract AI intentional Belief 67 -1.83 0.070AI intentional Belief 67 -1.83 0.070 abstract AI intentional Intention 67 -0.11 0.920AI intentional Intention 67 -0.11 0.920 abstract Human accidental Art 66 0.79 0.430Human accidental Art 66 0.79 0.430 abstract Human accidental Artist 66 -0.06 0.950Human accidental Artist 66 -0.06 0.950 abstract Human accid...
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According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences... more
According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane.
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While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is... more
While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attribute...
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The recent controversy about misinformation has moved a question into the focus of the public eye that has occupied philosophers for decades: Under what conditions is it appropriate to assert a certain claim? When asserting a claim that x... more
The recent controversy about misinformation has moved a question into the focus of the public eye that has occupied philosophers for decades: Under what conditions is it appropriate to assert a certain claim? When asserting a claim that x , must one know that x ? Must x be true? Might it be normatively acceptable to assert whatever one believes? In the largest cross-cultural study to date (total n = 1,091) on the topic, findings from the United States, Germany, and Japan suggest that, in order to claim that x , x need not be known, and it can be false. However, the data show, we do expect considerable epistemic responsibility on the speaker’s behalf: In order to appropriately assert a claim, the speaker must have good reasons to believe it.
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Increasingly complex and autonomous systems require machine ethics to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks to society arising from the new technology. It is challenging to decide which type of ethical theory to employ and how to... more
Increasingly complex and autonomous systems require machine ethics to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks to society arising from the new technology. It is challenging to decide which type of ethical theory to employ and how to implement it effectively. This survey provides a threefold contribution. First, it introduces a trimorphic taxonomy to analyze machine ethics implementations with respect to their object (ethical theories), as well as their nontechnical and technical aspects. Second, an exhaustive selection and description of relevant works is presented. Third, applying the new taxonomy to the selected works, dominant research patterns, and lessons for the field are identified, and future directions for research are suggested.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Semantics, and 14 moreContextualism, Truth, Relativism, Linguistics, Philosophy of Linguistics, Semantics (Computer Science), Possible Worlds, Contextualism and relativism, Propositions, Indexicality, Truth Relativism, Necessity, Perspectivism, and Gareth Evans
When two actors have exactly the same mental states but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits milder moral judgment among bystanders. We hypothesized that the... more
When two actors have exactly the same mental states but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits milder moral judgment among bystanders. We hypothesized that the social role from which transgressions are perceived would moderate this outcome effect. In three preregistered experiments (N = 950), we randomly assigned participants to imagine and respond to moral scenarios as actor (i.e., perpetrator), victim, or bystander. Results revealed highly similar outcome effects on moral judgment across social roles. However, as predicted, the social role moderated the strength of the outcome effect on interpersonal goals pertaining to agency and communion. Although in agreement about the blameworthiness of lucky and unlucky actors, victims’ agency and communion were more sensitive to the outcome severity than perpetrators’ agency and communion, with bystanders’ outcome sensitivity falling in between. Outcome severity affect...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Social Psychology, Philosophy, Ethics, Moral Psychology, and 13 moreCognition, Theory of Mind, Medicine, Bernard Williams, Deliberation, Moral Luck, Language Culture and Communication, Blame, Negligence, Luck, Moral Disengagement, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and punishment psychology
A coherent practice of mens rea ('guilty mind') ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action's outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent... more
A coherent practice of mens rea ('guilty mind') ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action's outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation...
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For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies... more
For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies should be replicable, in the sense that its methods and procedure should be detailed enough for someone else to conduct the same study. Second, for empirical results to provide a solid foundation for scientific theorizing, they should also be replicable, in the sense that most attempts at replicating the original study that produced them would yield similar results. The XPhi Replicability Project is primarily concerned with replicability in the second sense, that is: the replicability of results. In the past year, several projects have shed doubt on the replicability of key findings in psychology, and most notably social psychology. Because the methods of experimental philosophy have often been close to the ones used in social psychology, it is onl...
Research Interests: Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Personality Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and 15 moreExperimental Psychology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Science, Experimental philosophy, Educational Psychology, Philosophy of Psychology, Medicine, Replicability, Replication, Reproducibility, and Meta Analysis and Systematic Review
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The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this... more
The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary people willing to ascribe deceptive intentions to artificial agents? (b) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (c) Do people blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than they presently receive.
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Recent research shows-somewhat astonishingly-that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]-[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral-psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our... more
Recent research shows-somewhat astonishingly-that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]-[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral-psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system runs a risk of poisoning people by using a novel type of fertilizer. Manipulating the computational (or quasi-cognitive) abilities of the AI system in a between-subjects design, we tested whether people's willingness to ascribe knowledge of a substantial risk of harm (i.e., recklessness) and blame to the AI system. Furthermore, we investigated whether the ascription of recklessness and blame to the AI system would influence the perceived blameworthiness of the system's user (or owner). In an experiment with 347 participants, we found (i) that people are willing to ascribe blame to AI systems in contexts of recklessness, (ii) that blame ascriptions depend strongly on the willingness to attribute recklessness and (iii) that the latter, in turn, depends on the perceived "cognitive" capacities of the system. Furthermore, our results suggest (iv) that the higher the computational sophistication of the AI system, the more blame is shifted from the human user to the AI system.
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We empirically explore the Knobe Effect among French legal professionals and trace out its implication for the law.
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Despite a voluminous literature on happiness and well-being, there is still no scholarly consensus on whether happiness and well-being are purely psychological phenomena, or for that matter whether they are identical. Commentators... more
Despite a voluminous literature on happiness and well-being, there is still no scholarly consensus on whether happiness and well-being are purely psychological phenomena, or for that matter whether they are identical. Commentators frequently defend their views by reference to intuitions about the nature of happiness or well-being, raising the question of how representative those intuitions are. In a series of studies we examined lay intuitions involving a variety happiness and well-being-related terms to assess their sensitivity to psychological (internal) versus external conditions. We found that all terms, including 'happy', 'doing well' and 'good life', were far more sensitive to internal than external conditions, suggesting that for laypersons, mental states are the most important part of happiness and well-being. But several terms, including 'doing well', 'good life' and 'enviable life' were also sensitive to external conditions , consistent with dominant philosophical views of well-being. 'Happy', by contrast, appears to be ambiguous: for many participants, but not all, it was completely insensitive to external conditions, suggesting that the folk are divided about whether happiness is purely a psychological notion or equivalent to well-being. Overall, our findings suggest that lay thinking about matters of well-being divides between two concepts, or families of concepts: a purely psychological notion associated with 'happy', and one or more notions related to the philosophical concept of well-being that concern how well a person's life is going and are generally thought to involve both psychological and external conditions. Strikingly, even though the folk do not generally seem to endorse mental state views of well-being, they seem clearly to regard mental states as more important for well-being than external conditions.
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Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the puzzle of moral luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for... more
Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the puzzle of moral luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility and punishment judgments, whether people's concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect. Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective deliberation, wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments across different moral luck conditions are the same for the vast majority of people. The philosophical puzzle of moral luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply does not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome-dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this is evidence in favor of current dual-process theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified since punishment does not pattern with blame. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases.
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Assertions are speech acts by means of which we express beliefs. As such they are at the heart of our linguistic and social practices. Recent research has focused extensively on the question whether the speech act of assertion is governed... more
Assertions are speech acts by means of which we express beliefs. As such they are at the heart of our linguistic and social practices. Recent research has focused extensively on the question whether the speech act of assertion is governed by norms, and if so, under what conditions it is acceptable to make an assertion. Standard theories propose, for instance, that one should only assert that p if one knows that p (the knowledge account), or that one should only assert that p if p is true (the truth account). In a series of four experiments, this question is addressed empirically. Contrary to previous findings, knowledge turns out to be a poor predictor of assertability, and the norm of assertion is not factive either. The studies here presented provide empirical evidence in favour of the view that a speaker is warranted to assert that p only if her belief that p is justified.
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An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established... more
An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved.
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This article explores whether perspective taking has an impact on the ascription of epistemic states. To do so, a new method is introduced which incites participants to imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist of a short... more
This article explores whether perspective taking has an impact on the ascription of epistemic states. To do so, a new method is introduced which incites participants to imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist of a short vignette and to judge from her perspective. In a series of experiments (total N=1980), perspective proves to have a significant impact on belief ascriptions, but not on knowledge ascriptions. For belief, perspective is further found to moderate the episte-mic side-effect effect significantly. It is hypothesized that the surprising findings are driven by the special epistemic authority we enjoy in assessing our own belief states, which does not extend to the assessment of our own knowledge states.
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A coherent practice of mens rea ('guilty mind') ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action's outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another... more
A coherent practice of mens rea ('guilty mind') ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action's outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of in-tentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law.
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The paper introduces a phenomenon called perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the debate between relativists and contextualists about predicates of personal taste. Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according... more
The paper introduces a phenomenon called perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the debate between relativists and contextualists about predicates of personal taste. Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according to which certain claims containing multiple predicates of personal taste can be sensitive to various contextually salient perspectives. For instance, if a father reports on a family holiday in Italy by saying ‘The wine was delicious and the water slide a lot of fun’, the predicate ‘delicious’ – in suitable contexts – must be relativized to the father and ‘fun’ to the kids. The paper argues that perspectival plurality raises severe problems for relativist semantics of perspectival expressions. Plurality blocks any attempt to justify parameter proliferation by aid of Kaplanian operator arguments, and it frustrates reasonable relativist strategies to account for syntactic binding.
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In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For instance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of... more
In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For instance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of positive emotions and are equally satisfied with their lives are judged as happy to different degrees if one is less moral than the other. Considering that the relation between morality and happiness or self-interest has been one of the central questions of moral philosophy since at least Plato, such a result would be of considerable philosophical interest. On closer examination of the original research and new studies, we suggest that the data point to a different conclusion: in the dominant folk understanding of happiness, morality has no fundamental role. Findings seeming to indicate a moralized concept are better explained, we suggest, by folk theories on which extreme moral turpitude indicates that an individual suffers from psychological dysfunction.
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Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims... more
Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism and inconsistent with relativism, the results suggest that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of utterance, not the context of assessment.
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In two experiments (total N=693) we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art, and robots as artists. Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven... more
In two experiments (total N=693) we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art, and robots as artists. Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven robot v. human agent), (ii) behavior type (intentional creation of a painting v. accidental creation), and (iii) object type (abstract v. representational painting). We found that people judge robot paintings and human painting as art to roughly the same extent. However, people are much less willing to consider robots as artists than humans, which is partially explained by the fact that they are less disposed to attribute artistic intentions to robots.
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In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability-a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful... more
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability-a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all are successful, but at least some prove promising. They should, we argue, be taken into consideration in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
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This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular... more
This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury.
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The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers focus on the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g. in education or health). In this... more
The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers focus on the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g. in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: Robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment with 399 participants which explores the following three questions: (i) Are ordinary people willing to ascribe intentions to deceive to artificial agents? (ii) Are they as willing to judge a robot lie as a lie as they would be when human agents engage in verbal deception? (iii) Do they blame a lying artificial agent to the same extent as a lying human agent? The response to all three questions is a resounding yes. This, I argue, implies that robot deception and its normative consequences deserve considerably more attention than it presently attracts.
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At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique context for moral... more
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline professionals at intensive care units around the world faced gruesome decisions about how to ration life-saving medical resources. These events provided a unique context for moral psychologists to understand how the general public reasons about real-world dilemmas involving trade-offs between human lives-in contrast to most prior research pursuing parallel questions via hypothetical thought experiments with limited relevance to the real world. In three studies (total N = 2387), we examined people's moral attitudes toward triage of acute coronavirus patients. Our findings indicate that people generally support utilitarian approaches to critical care triage. These utilitarian tendencies do not stem from a period change in people's moral attitudes (relative to pre-pandemic levels); rather, people favor utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas more than structurally analogous, non-medical dilemmas. Support for utilitarian triage decisions was rooted in prosocial dispositions, including empathy and impartial beneficence-which defies the received wisdom in moral psychology. Finally, despite abundant evidence of political polarization surrounding Covid-19, moral attitudes toward critical care triage differed modestly between liberals and conservatives. Taken together, our findings highlight people's robust support for utilitarian measures in the face of a global public health threat. Our results also illustrate how the dominant research methods in moral psychology may be handicapped by their reliance on hypothetical stimuli (e.g., trolley cases) and could deliver insights that do not generalize to real-world, ethical priorities.
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When two actors have exactly the same mental states but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits milder moral judgment among bystanders. We hypothesized that the... more
When two actors have exactly the same mental states but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits milder moral judgment among bystanders. We hypothesized that the social role from which transgressions are perceived would moderate this outcome effect. In three preregistered experiments (N = 950), we randomly assigned participants to imagine and respond to moral scenarios as actor (i.e., perpetrator), victim, or bystander. Results revealed highly similar outcome effects on moral judgment across social roles. However, as predicted, the social role moderated the strength of the outcome effect on interpersonal goals pertaining to agency and communion. Although in agreement about the blameworthiness of lucky and unlucky actors, victims’ agency and communion were more sensitive to the outcome severity than perpetrators’ agency and communion, with bystanders’ outcome sensitivity falling in between. Outcome severity affected agency and communion directly instead of being mediated by moral judgment. We discuss the possibility that outcome severity raises normative expectations regarding interaction in a transgression’s aftermath that are unrelated to moral considerations.
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This article sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they... more
This article sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. We argue that the reflection defense is misguided: We present five studies (N>1800) showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful reflection as they do in the conditions standardly used by experimental philosophers.
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Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according to which certain claims containing multiple predicates of taste can be sensitive to various contextually salient perspectives. For instance, if a father reports on a family holiday in... more
Perspectival plurality is the phenomenon according to which certain claims containing multiple predicates of taste can be sensitive to various contextually salient perspectives. For instance, if a father reports on a family holiday in Italy by saying 'The wine was delicious and the water slide a lot of fun', the predicate 'delicious' – in suitable contexts – must be relativized to the father and 'fun' to the kids. The paper argues that perspectival plurality raises severe problems for nonindexicalist semantics of perspectival expressions. Plurality blocks any attempt to justify parameter proliferation by aid of Kaplanian operator arguments, and it frustrates reasonable nonindexicalist strategies to account for syntactic binding. Both arguments must be taken serious: As the second, empirical part of the paper demonstrates with experiments targeting both predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals, perspectival plurality is a genuine feature of ordinary linguistic discourse.
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According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element (a standard of taste, an epistemic situa-... more
According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element (a standard of taste, an epistemic situa- tion) must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders ‘‘thin’’ or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Ko ̈lbel, Lasersohn and MacFarlane to the ‘‘incompleteness worry’’. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism con- flates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible.
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According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences... more
According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane.