In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their (...) intuitive judgments about cases. In contrast, the mischaracterization objection seems considerably more promising than its largely negative reception has suggested. We argue that the burden of proof is thus on philosophers who still hold that the method of cases crucially relies on intuitive judgments about cases. Finally, we discuss whether conceptual engineering provides an alternative to the method of cases in light of the challenge from experimental philosophy. We argue that this is not clearly the case, because conceptual engineering also requires descriptive information about the concepts it aims to improve. However, its primarily normative perspective on our concepts makes it largely orthogonal to the challenge from experimental philosophy, and it can also benefit from the empirical methods of the latter. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged kind is (...) largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that Frege’s and Hilbert’s mutual disagreement results from different notions of Anschauung and their relation to axioms. In the first section of the paper, evidence is provided to support that Frege and Hilbert were influenced by the same developments of 19th-century geometry, in particular the work of Gauss, Plücker, and von Staudt. The second section of the paper shows that Frege and Hilbert take different approaches to deal with the problems that the developments in 19th-century (...) geometry posed for the traditional Kantian philosophy of mathematics. Frege maintains that Anschauung is a source of knowledge by which we acknowledge geometrical axioms as true. For Hilbert, in contrast, axioms provide one of several correct “pictures” of reality. Hilbert’s position is thereby deeply influenced by epistemological ideas from Hertz and Helmholtz, and, in turn, influenced the neo-Kantian Cassirer. (shrink)

Frege ist bekannt für seinen Versuch, die Arithmetik aus der Logik herzuleiten. Doch welcher Begriff von Logik liegt diesem Projekt zugrunde? Wenn Logik die Grundlage der Arithmetik ist und die Arithmetik über Inhalte verfestigt, so muss die Logik selbst eine Wissenschaft mit eigenen Inhalten sein. Die Autorin zeigt, wie Frege logische Zeichen zu eigenständigen Begriffen aufwertet und dadurch eine inhaltliche Logikkonzeption überhaupt erst ermöglicht. In einem weiteren Schritt wird ein Kriterium vorgestellt, mit dessen Hilfe Frege logische Inhalte von den Inhalten (...) anderer Wissenschaften abgrenzt. Dabei wird jedoch deutlich, dass Frege bis in die 1890er Jahre braucht, um sich vollständig vom Kantischen Diktum zu lösen, die Logik sei nur ein negativer Probierstein der Wahrheit. Die Suche nach dem Grund, der Frege zu einer inhaltlichen Konzeption von Logik zwang, führt in die Geometriegeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Vor ihrem Hintergrund werden schließlich die Anfangsparagraphen der Grundlagen der Arithmetik in einem neuen Licht interpretiert. (shrink)

English summary: The name Friedrich Nietzsche became important in the reception history of theology mainly due to his criticism of religion. In this study, Tabea Knura takes theological as well as pedagogical reception approaches and subsequently conceptualises impulses for an unprecedented debate with Nietzsche about religious education. She shows that the philosopher's critical analysis encourages looking critically at religious education, and that his reflections constantly initiate new construction processes, pointing to an affirmative and simultaneously epistemological attitude reflected in religious (...) education's mission. Questioning religious development processes therefore gives impetus to a cognitive-critical interpretation of reality that religious education must be based on. German description: Der Name Friedrich Nietzsche hat in der theologischen Rezeptionsgeschichte vor allem aufgrund seiner religionskritischen Ausserungen Bedeutung erlangt. Tabea Knura greift in dieser Studie theologische wie auch padagogische Rezeptionsansatze auf und konzipiert in der Folge Impulse fur eine bisher noch nicht erfolgte religionspadagogische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Philosophen. Sie zeigt, dass Nietzsches kritisches Denken dazu anregt, religiose Bildungsprozesse kritisch in den Blick zu nehmen. Seine religions- und bildungskritischen Uberlegungen initiieren immer neue Konstruktionsprozesse. Dies zeugt von einer affirmativen und zugleich erkenntniskritischen Haltung, die im religionspadagogischen Bildungsauftrag reflektiert wird. Religiose Entwicklungsprozesse zu hinterfragen wird so zum Impuls einer erkenntniskritischen Wirklichkeitsdeutung, die Fundament religioser Bildung sein muss. (shrink)

Studies on temporality in Sidonius’ letters have so far been dominated by narratological approaches. This article proposes an additional perspective by focusing on social and ethical dimensions of time issues. Drawing from scholarship on both imperial epistolography and ancient timekeeping, I develop a framework for studying temporal-behavior patterns as negotiations of elite habitus. Many letters that provide insights in temporal habits (chronotypes) define also in- and out-groups based on temporal conventions (chronotopes). Time management displays a life order Sidonius can approve (...) or disapprove of. The motif of the clepsydra illustrates this connection between temporal habits and senatorial ethos most vividly. (shrink)

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a (...) priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted. (shrink)

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

In what follows, the difference between Frege’s and Schröder’s understanding of logical connectives will be investigated. It will be argued that Frege thought of logical connectives as concepts, whereas Schröder thought of them as operations. For Frege, logical connectives can themselves be connected. There is no substantial difference between the connectives and the concepts they connect. Frege’s distinction between concepts and objects is central to this conception, because it allows a method of concept formation which enables us to form concepts (...) from the logical connectives alone. Schröder in contrast unifies the distinction between concepts and objects, but keeps the distinction between logical connectives and what they connect. It will be argued that Frege’s particular way of perceiving logical connectives is crucial for his foundational project. (shrink)

This article provides insight into the entwinement of the allegedly neutral category of handedness with questions of sex/gender, reproduction, dis/ability, and scientific authority. In the 1860s, Paul Broca suggested that the speech centre sat in the left brain hemisphere in most humans, and that right-handedness stemmed from this asymmetry. One century later, British psychologists Marian Annett and Chris McManus proposed biologically unconfirmed theories of how handedness and brain asymmetry were passed on in families. Their idea to integrate chance into genetic (...) models of handedness was novel, and so was their use of computerized statistics to parse out the incidence of handedness genotypes and phenotypes. Notwithstanding significant conceptual and methodological overlaps, McManus and Annett did not collaborate and proposed competing theories. I analyse the sexed/gendered dimensions of their controversy by drawing on published literature, unpublished documents, and oral history interviews. I first attend to the epistemological importance of sex/gender. Both psychologists published several iterations of their models, which increasingly relied on questions of sex/gender and reproduction. Annett additionally linked handedness with stereotypically gendered cognitive abilities. Second, I argue that using masculine-coded computer technologies contributed to Annett’s professional marginalization whereas similar methods endowed McManus with surplus authority. Finally, I show that Annett’s complicity in stabilizing sociocultural hierarchies within her theory mirrored her personal experience of marginalization based on sex/gender, age, education, and lack of institutional affiliation. This analysis exemplifies the entanglement of cognitive and social factors in scientific controversies and adds to the literature on 20th-century British women psychologists. (shrink)

From 1950 to 1952, statisticians W.G. Cochran, C.F. Mosteller, and J.W. Tukey reviewed A.C. Kinsey and colleagues’ methodology. Neither the history-and-philosophy of science literature nor contemporary theories of interdisciplinarity seem to offer a conceptual model that fits this forced interaction, which was characterized by significant power asymmetries and disagreements on multiple levels. The statisticians initially attempted to exclude all non-technical matters from their evaluation, but their political and personal investments interfered with this agenda. In the face of McCarthy’s witch hunts, (...) negotiations with Kinsey and his funding institutions became integral to the review group’s work. This paper analyzes the heavy burden of emotional and affective labor in this collaboration, the conflicts caused by competing visions of objectivity, and the uses of statistical knowledge to gain and sustain authority. Kinsey’s refusal to adopt the recommended probability sample damaged his already precarious position even further and marked him as a biased researcher who put his personal agenda above methodological rigor. Kinsey’s uncooperative demeanor can be explained by distrust resulting from numerous adverse reactions to his work and by fear of having his sexuality exposed. This case study illustrates that the very concept of valid numbers can become an arena for power struggles and that quantification alone does not guarantee productive exchanges across disciplines. It calls for a deeper conceptual analysis of the prerequisites for successful scientific collaborations. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

Recent studies have highlighted the relevance of sleep for procrastination at work. Procrastination at work is defined as the irrational delay of the initiation or completion of work-related activities. In line with recent studies, we offer a self-regulation perspective on procrastination. We argue that procrastination is an outcome of depleted self-regulatory resources and that the restoration of self-regulatory resources during high-quality sleep at night would prevent procrastination.AimsIn an attempt to further develop this line of research, the current study aimed to (...) achieve a broader understanding of the relevance of sleep and circadian rhythm for procrastination. Therefore, we explored the effect of sleep quality on procrastination for different chronotypes. We also considered the shift to daylight saving time as a phenomenon that aggravates circadian misalignment and thereby later chronotypes' dependence on high-quality sleep. Specifically, we hypothesized that compared to employees with an earlier chronotype, employees with a later chronotype are more dependent on good sleep at night to prevent procrastination the next day. This effect would be especially pronounced after the shift to daylight saving time.MethodsFor this repeated-measures study, participants were 101 full-time employees. They completed a general questionnaire and day-specific questionnaires on the Monday before and the Monday following the shift to daylight saving time.ResultsThe multilevel analyses showed that employees procrastinated less on days following nights during which they slept better and that later chronotypes experienced more procrastination than earlier chronotypes. Our findings also supported the hypothesis that the relationship between sleep quality and procrastination is stronger for later chronotypes compared to earlier chronotypes on the Monday following the shift to daylight saving time. In other words, the lower the sleep quality of later chronotypes during the previous night, the more they procrastinated on the Monday following the shift to daylight saving time.DiscussionOur findings further corroborate the existing findings on the relevance of sleep and chronotype for well-being and performance at work. (shrink)

Background Palliative care is an integral part of health care, which in term has become increasingly technologized in recent decades. Lately, innovative smart sensors combined with artificial intelligence promise better diagnosis and treatment. But to date, it is unclear: how are palliative care concepts and their underlying assumptions about humans challenged by smart sensor technologies (SST) and how can care benefit from SST? -/- Aims The paper aims to identify changes and challenges in palliative care due to the use of (...) SST. In addition, normative guiding criteria for the use of SST are developed. -/- Methods The principle of Total Care used by the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) forms the basis for the ethical analysis. Drawing on this, its underlying conceptions of the human and its socio-ethical aspects are examined with a phenomenological focus. In the second step, the advantages, limitations, and socio-ethical challenges of using SST with respect to the Total Care principle are explored. Finally, ethical-normative requirements for the application of SST are derived. -/- Results and Conclusion First, SST are limited in their measurement capabilities. Second, SST have an impact on human agency and autonomy. This concerns both the patient and the caregiver. Third, some aspects of the Total Care principle are likely to be marginalized due to the use of SST. The paper formulates normative requirements for using SST to serve human flourishing. It unfolds three criteria according to which SST must be aligned: (1) evidence and purposefulness, (2) autonomy, and (3) Total Care. (shrink)

The use of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in health care opens up new opportunities for the measurement of the human. Their application aims not only at gathering more and better data points but also at doing it less invasive. With this change in health care towards its extension to almost all areas of life and its increasing invisibility and opacity, new questions of transparency arise. While the complex human-machine interactions involved in deploying and using AI tend to become non-transparent, (...) the use of these technologies makes the patient seemingly transparent. Papers on the ethical implementation of AI plead for transparency but neglect the factor of the “transparent patient” as intertwined with AI. Transparency in this regard appears to be Janus-faced: The precondition for receiving help - e.g., treatment advice regarding the own health - is to become transparent for the digitized health care system. That is, for instance, to donate data and become visible to the AI and its operators. The paper reflects on this entanglement of transparent patients and (non-) transparent technology. It argues that transparency regarding both AI and humans is not an ethical principle per se but an infraethical concept. Further, it is no sufficient basis for avoiding harm and human dignity violations. Rather, transparency must be enriched by intelligibility following Judith Butler’s use of the term. Intelligibility is understood as an epistemological presupposition for recognition and the ensuing humane treatment. Finally, the paper highlights ways to testify intelligibility in dealing with AI in health care ex ante, ex post, and continuously. (shrink)

This paper presents a social-theologically informed interpretation of the term integrity, as it occurs in fundamental law. It explores the manifestations of integrity violations and proceeds to draw an inference: an integrity violation can directly emanate from a misconception regarding integrity itself, as well as the implementation of protective measures that follow it. Integrity in its wholeness dimension is understood as open-endedness and non-seclusion rather than as a substantial, clearly definable characteristic of a person. This open-endedness and non-seclusion results from (...) the relational constitution of an individual. Consequently, it follows that a violation of integrity occurs when the open-endedness and non-seclusion of a person and their relational Becoming is hindered. The new definition of integrity is particularly important when it comes to the governance of new health technologies, especially Digital Twins that can become representatives of a person. Human integrity is non-violated only when it is understood as open to relational Becoming and this Becoming shows its expression in the mutual enabling and support of self-articulation. (shrink)

Ancient Greek philosophers claimed that the particular task of art was mimesis. This kind of view about the relation between art and the world was dominant until the beginning of the 19th century. The theory of genius rethought this relation, and it did not presume that art needs to mirror the world. On the contrary, it expected originality, that is, the creation of a new world. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the artworld operates under a wider notion of (...) the ‘work of art’, e.g. Duchamp’s “readymade” and “institutional readymade”, which are linked to outsider art. In both cases, the creation of an object and the creation of an art piece are separate actions performed by different individuals. This paper attempts to tackle these problems and prove that the contemporary art does not relate primarily to the world, but mainly to the artworld. Thus, the path from art to the world goes through the artworld. (shrink)

Family relations between Greek eponymous heroes almost certainly reflect political or commonly agreed ethnic relationships between the communities concerned. Pelops and his proverbially numerous descendants are investigated here from this perspective and it is argued that the creation of eponymous Pelopids was primarily due to political motivations. Pelops as one of the most remote ancestors of Sparta was used, already by the 5th century BC, to establish connections on a mythological level with those cities which became the allies of the (...) Lakedaimonians and are commonly known as the members of the Peloponnesian League. It is also suggested that after the battle of Plataea, these poleis erected a victory monument at Olympia on their own, which is commonly referred to as the “Achaean monument”. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to discuss research ethics in mixed-methods research and MMR development with a focus on ethical challenges that stem from working with technical instruments such as mobile eye-trackers. Design/methodology/approach The case of an interdisciplinary mixed-methods development study that aimed at researching the impacts of emerging mobile augmented-reality technologies on the perception of public places serves as an example to discuss research-ethical challenges regarding the practical implementation of the study, data processing and management and societal implications of developing (...) instruments to track and understand human practices. Findings This study reports challenges and experiences in ethical decision-making in the practical implementation of the study regarding the relationship to research subjects, the use of mobile research instruments in public places and the interdisciplinary cooperation among research team members. Further, this paper expounds on ethical challenges and recommendations in data processing and management and with a view to societal implications of method development and the aspirations of transdisciplinarity. This study concludes that institutionalized ethics need to become more flexible, while applied ethics and reflection must make their entry into university curricula across disciplines. Originality/value Complex interdisciplinary mobile and mixed-methods projects that involve sensors and instruments such as mobile eye-trackers are on the rise. However, there is a significant lack of engagement with practical research ethical challenges, practices and requirements in both mixed-methods and method-development literature. By taking a context- and process-oriented perspective focusing on doing ethics, the paper contributes a concrete empirical case to these underdeveloped fields. (shrink)

Since uncertainty is a major challenge in medicine and bears the risk of causing incorrect diagnoses and harmful treatment, there are many efforts to tackle it. For some time, AI technologies have been increasingly implemented in medicine and used to reduce medical uncertainties. What initially seems desirable, however, poses challenges. We use a multimethod approach that combines philosophical inquiry, conceptual analysis, and ethical considerations to identify key challenges that arise when AI is used for medical certainty purposes. We identify several (...) challenges. Where AI is used to reduce medical uncertainties, it is likely to result in (a) patients being stripped down to their measurable data points, and being made disambiguous. Additionally, the widespread use of AI technologies in health care bears the risk of (b) human physicians being pushed out of the medical decision-making process, and patient participation being more and more limited. Further, the successful use of AI requires extensive and invasive monitoring of patients, which raises (c) questions about surveillance as well as privacy and security issues. We outline these several challenges and show that they are immediate consequences of AI-driven security efforts. If not addressed, they could entail unfavorable consequences. We contend that diminishing medical uncertainties through AI involves a tradeoff. The advantages, including enhanced precision, personalization, and overall improvement in medicine, are accompanied by several novel challenges. This paper addresses them and gives suggestions about how to use AI for certainty purposes without causing harm to patients. (shrink)

Descriptions of Gettier cases can be interpreted in ways that are incompatible with the standard judgment that they are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. Timothy Williamson claims that this problem cannot be avoided by adding further stipulations to the case descriptions. To the contrary, we argue that there is a fairly simple way to amend the Ford case, a standard description of a Gettier case, in such a manner that all deviant interpretations are ruled out. This removes one (...) major objection to interpreting our judgments about Gettier cases as strict conditionals. (shrink)

Erratum to: Philos Stud DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0226-3Dear Reader, due to production systems the following changes could not be made to this article:In the paragraph immediately preceding the case description (ford-iii), the sentenceHere we explicitly state that Smith’s inference is based only on his belief that Jones owns a Ford, and that this logical inference provides Smith’s only justification for believing that someone in his office owns a Ford (to make things fully precise, we also add a time index).should be replaced withHere (...) we explicitly state that Smith’s inference is based only on his belief that Jones owns a Ford (plus the justified background belief that Jones is in his office), and that this logical inference provides Smith’s only justification for believing that someone in his office owns a Ford (to make things fully precise, we also add a time index).The added part is highlighted in boldface.And within the case description (ford-iii), the sentenceFrom this belief alone. (shrink)

The impact of incidental emotions on decision making is well established. Incidental emotions can be differentiated on several appraisal dimensions, including certainty-uncertainty. The present research investigates the effect of certainty-uncertainty of incidental emotions on hedonic forecasting. The results of four experimental studies indicate that uncertainty associated incidental emotions, such as fear and hope, compared with certainty emotions, such as anger and happiness, amplify predicted utility. This amplification effect is confirmed for opposite utility types; uncertainty associated emotions, when compared with their (...) certainty counterparts, lead to an overprediction of positive utilities and to an underprediction of negative utilities. In line with the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (Lerner and Keltner, 2000; 2001), this effect is mediated by the prediction task uncertainty, providing evidence for a carryover process of the incidental emotion. The effect of task uncertainty on predicted utility is, in turn, partly mediated by attention to the task, suggesting that an affective adaptation process (AREA model; Wilson & Gilbert, 2008) lies behind the amplification of forecasts. Taken together, these findings extend the impact of certainty-uncertainty to the context of hedonic forecasting and further corroborate the impact of incidental emotions in judgement and decision making. (shrink)

Recent communication research indicates that approach and avoidance constitute two separate yet co-existing processes during media exposure. While many studies address TV approach behavior, little is known about TV avoidance behavior. Furthermore, personality has yet to be linked to avoidance behavior. This study analyzes the influence of personality on TV program avoidance. Data show that the “Big Five” personality characteristics and Risk and Fight Willingness influence program avoidance, albeit to varying degrees. While the specific correlations are discussed in the paper, (...) the results generally reveal that the combination of personality and avoidance has added value in terms of understanding of TV using behavior compared to the frequently analyzed link between personality and approach. For nearly all personality characteristics, data show that the avoidance perspective is more than the inversion of the approach perspective. The findings are discussed with reference to gratification and selectivity research. (shrink)

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss relevant findings from experimental metaphilosophy that largely tell against this assumption. To advance the debate, we present the most comprehensive experimental study of intuitive expertise in ethics to date, which tests five well- known biases of (...) judgment and decision-making among expert ethicists and laypeople. We found that even expert ethicists are affected by some of these biases, but also that they enjoy a slight advantage over laypeople in some cases. We discuss the implications of these results for the expertise defence, and conclude that they still do not support the defence as it is typically presented in (moral) philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophen berufen sich in Gedankenexperimenten oft auf Intuitionen. Doch werden diese Intuitionen auch von anderen Philosophen oder von philosophischen Laien geteilt? Und durch welche Faktoren werden sie eigentlich bestimmt? Experimentelle Philosophen gehen solchen Fragen seit einigen Jahren mit empirischen Methoden auf den Grund. Ihre Ergebnisse sind mitunter verblüffend und haben für Aufsehen gesorgt. Der vorliegende Band lässt führende Vertreter und Gegner dieser wachsenden Bewegung zu Wort kommen und will die bislang überwiegend englischsprachige Debatte verstärkt in die deutsche Philosophie hineintragen.

In this paper, we report the results of three high-powered replication studies in experimental philosophy, which bear on an alleged instability of folk philosophical intuitions: the purported susceptibility of epistemic intuitions about the Truetemp case (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge. Westview Press, Boulder, 1990) to order effects. Evidence for this susceptibility was first reported by Swain et al. (Philos Phenomenol Res 76(1):138–155, 2008); further evidence was then found in two studies by Wright (Cognition 115(3):491–503, 2010) and Weinberg et al. (Monist 95(2):200–222, (...) 2012). These empirical results have been quite influential in the recent metaphilosophical debate about the method of cases. However, none of Swain et al.’s ( 2008 ) predictions concerning order effects with Truetemp cases could be consistently and robustly replicated in our three experiments, and it is thus at best unclear whether Truetemp intuitions are in fact unstable. So, if proponents of the negative program in experimental philosophy still want to use order effects to challenge the reliability of philosophical case judgments, they would be well advised to look elsewhere instead. In any case, given the more robust empirical evidence that we present in this paper, the metaphilosophical flurry created by Swain et al. ( 2008 ) and Wright’s ( 2010 ) influential studies looks like mere alarmism in hindsight. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the 'master argument'. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising (...) objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call 'conservative restrictionism' as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism. (shrink)

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay (...) intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus. (shrink)

Capitalism has been an unprecedented engine of wealth creation for many centuries, leading to sustained productivity gains and long-term growth and lifting an increasing proportion of humanity out of poverty. But its effects, and hence its future, have come increasingly under question: Is capitalism still improving wealth and well-being for the many? Or, is long-term value creation being sacrificed to the pressures of short-termism, with potentially far-reaching consequences for society, the natural environment, prosperity, and global order? Building on a collaboration (...) between the Schulich School of Business and global management consultancy McKinsey & Company, this volume reflects both the urgency of the needed action and the tremendous opportunity to forge consensus and catalyze a lasting movement toward a more responsible, long-term, and sustainable model of capitalism. This unique volume brings together many of the leading proponents for a reformed, re-imagined capitalism from the Âfields of academia, business, and NGOs. Its contributors have been at the forefront of thought and action in regard to the future of capitalism. Both individually and collectively, they provide powerful suggestions of what such a long-term oriented model of capitalism should look like and how it can be achieved. Drawing on their research and professional experience, they write in an accessible style aiming to reach the broad audiences required to turn a re-imagined capitalism into a reality. (shrink)