Free Will and Experimental Philosophy

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori, who is a PhD student at Hokkaido University, a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) research fellow, and a new editor of this blog, Imperfect Cognitions. His main research area is the free will debate and experimental philosophy of free will. He is now working on a project which is related to folk intuition about free will. The aim of this project is to identify what intuition people actually have and why they express such intuition, in order to obtain clues for resolving the conflict between compatibilism and incompatibilism.

Kiichi Inarimori

In the free will debate, some argue that the free will necessary for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, while others argue that it is incompatible. Theorists on both sides have often claimed that their position is intuitive. Meanwhile, since 2000’s, folk intuitions have been the subject of empirical inquiry. So far, some research supports the view that most people have compatibilist intuition (Nahmias et al., 2005; 2006), while others support the view that most people have incompatibilist intuition (Nichols and Knobe, 2007).

There are some interpretations of these results, which explain either of the incompatibilist/compatibilist intuitions as due to some error. For example, Nichols and Knobe argue that most compatibilist intuition is due to performance error caused by emotional response. Some theorists also argue that much of either incompatibilist/compatibilist intuition is caused by comprehension errors. I am currently working on two projects related to these two types of error theory.

The first project is to propose a new interpretation of folk intuition, according to which different intuitions we exhibit are explained not by performance error, but by a kind of framing effect. Some studies show that different framing/representation of a same act (e.g., action/inaction) leads to different causal attribution and this leads to different moral judgment of the same act (cf. Cushman and Young, 2011).

My hypothesis is that, in the same way, different free will/moral responsibility attribution in each scenario may be mediated by causal attribution due to the different framings/representations of deterministic action, and therefore the process in which different intuition is produced can be understood as free of performance errors. I am currently designing an experiment to test this hypothesis.

The second project is related to comprehension errors. A recent study by Nadelhoffer et al. (2021) has shown that almost all participants in experimental philosophy of free will misunderstand determinism in some way. If so, empirical studies about folk intuitions are unreliable. In this regard I envisage two possibilities and am designing two studies.

One is to improve comprehension by using a video which describes a deterministic universe. The other study is to check the validity of the bypassing/intrusion statements used to check comprehension. Agreement with those statements may not reflect a conceptual misunderstanding of determinism. Rather, agreement with the statement may be due to cognitive bias.

I hope that this research will show that both compatibilist/incompatibilist intuition is not explained away by performance/comprehension errors. This would allow us to argue that both compatibilism and incompatibilism are intuitively justified.

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results. We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...

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