From Philosophical Concepts to Lay Concepts and Judgments. Edouard Machery University of Pittsburgh Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Transcription

1 From Philosophical Concepts to Lay Concepts and Judgments Edouard Machery University of Pittsburgh Department of History and Philosophy of Science

2 From Philosophy to Psychology Φ Ψ

3 From Philosophy to Psychology Examine whether lay people have some philosophical concept or embrace some philosophical thesis. Examine whether people think and reason about a domain roughly in accordance with some philosophical idea or theory.

4 Examples Explanatory power

5 Take-Home Message Three pitfalls: 1. Misunderstanding the philosophical concept 2. Mischaracterizing similarities and differences between lay and philosophical concepts 3. Expecting too much distinctness among lay concepts

6 Plan 1. Getting the philosophical concept or view right. 2. How to compare the folk to philosophers? 3. How clear and distinct should we expect lay concepts to be?

7 Plan 1. Getting the philosophical concept or view right. 2. How to compare the folk to philosophers? 3. How clear and distinct should we expect lay concepts to be?

8 Measuring Lay People's Commitment to Philosophical Notions Scale development

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11 The Philosophical Conception of Subjective Experience: Phenomenal Consciousness Mental states such as seeing red, feeling pain, hearing a C#, feeling anger, etc., share the second-order property that it is like something to have these states.

12 When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations mental images the felt quality of emotion. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

13 Gray, Gray & Wegner (2006)

14 Plan 1. Getting the philosophical concept or view right. 2. How to compare the folk to philosophers? 3. How clear and distinct should we expect lay concepts to be?

15 A Common Kind of Question Do lay people conceive of some topics as philosophers do?

16 Examples Gray et al Knobe & Prinz, 2008 Sytsma & Machery 2009, 2010 Starmans & Friedman, 2013 Nagel et al. In press Machery et al. Ms

17 A Strategy Comparing philosophers' and lay people's categorization judgments explicitly or implicitly

18 Highly Fallible Evidence Similarities and differences between philosophers and lay people's categorization judgments are highly fallible evidence of shared and non-shared concepts

19 Highly Fallible Evidence What people say about a situation Infer Conception of sthg

20 Highly Fallible Evidence Conception of sthg How people interpret the situation they are presented with Cause What people say about a situation

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22 What about Lay People? 1. Ordinary people conceive of subjective experiences as being phenomenal. 2. Ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as being phenomenal.

23 Knobe & Prinz (2008)

24 Dubious Similarity? Sytsma & Machery (2009, Phil. Psychology) Is the reluctance to ascribe experiences to group agents due to the fact that group agents cannot have phenomenal consciousness or is it due to participants' assumption about the inadequate complexity of corporations?

25 What We are Trying to Do Conception of subjective experience What people say about the mental states of group agents Infer

26 The Problem Conception of subjective experience How people think about mental states and corporations Cause What people say about the mental states of group agents

27 What about Lay People? 1. Ordinary people conceive of subjective experiences as being phenomenal. 2. Ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as being phenomenal.

28 Study 1: Experimental Design 2x2x2x2 design Between-subjects factors: - Subject: Philosophers vs. nonphilosophers - Mental state: Pain vs. color - Ascribee: Human vs. simple robot Within-subjects factor: - self vs. ordinary people

29 Self x Color x Robot

30 Self x Pain x Robot

31 Results (Self, N = 603)

32 Philosophers on Ordinary People

33 Dubious Difference? Is the willingness to ascribe visual experiences to a simple robot due to the fact that lay people do not have a concept of phenomenal consciousness or is it due to their assumptions about visual experiences?

34 What We are Trying to Do Conception of subjective experience What people say about the mental states of a simple robot Infer

35 The Problem Conception of subjective experience How people think about mental states and robots Cause What people say about the mental states of a simple robot

36 Dubious Difference? 1. Same concept of phenomenal consciousness but lay people don't believe that it applies it to seeing red. 2. Same concept of phenomenal consciousness but lay people believe that understood one way seeing red is phenomenal, understood the other way it isn't. 3. Same concept of phenomenal consciousness, but the stimuli simply failed to elicit application.

37 1. Are Colors Non- Phenomenal? color sensations stand out as the paradigm examples of conscious experience, due to their pure, seemingly ineffable qualitative nature. Some color experiences can seem particularly striking, and so can be particularly good at focusing our attention on the mystery of consciousness. In my environment now, there is a particularly rich shade of deep purple from a book on my shelf; an almost surreal shade of green in a photograph of ferns on my wall; and a sparkling array of bright red, green, orange, and blue lights on a Christmas tree that I can see through my window. Chalmers 1996, 6-7 color has always been the philosophers favorite example, and I will go along with tradition for the time being Dennett 1991

38 2. Seeing Red is ambiguous If participants are asked to make judgments about whether something looks red to various entities, such responses may be confounded by the fact that looks is polysemous. On one interpretation of looks, seeing red requires only that a system has detected red things and reported having done so. However, on a more phenomenal interpretation of looks the entity would also have to be the subject of an immediate experience of red. But there seems to be no obvious way to guarantee that all participants in a psychological experiment will adopt the intended reading! (...) Thus, an experiment designed to examine judgments about sensation seems ill advised. Huebner

39 Is Seeing Red Ambiguous?

40 The Valence Hypothesis Seeing red Smelling Isoamyl Acetate The folk distinguish mental states that have a (positive or negative) valence from those that do not. Smelling banana 1 Smelling banana 2 Smelling vomit Feeling anger Feeling pain Jimmy

41 3. Failure to Elicit Concept Application A Two-System Objection Folk judgments studied by these researchers are mostly likely generated by a certain cognitive system System One that will generate the same data whether or not we experience phenomenal consciousness. This is a problem for a range of current experimental philosophy research into consciousness or our concept of it Brian Talbot Consciousness & Cognition 2012

42 Rejoinder (Sytsma & Machery, Consciousness & Cognition 2012) Examine whether people answers differently in the seeing red vignette when one elicits reflective intuitions.

43 Study A Examine whether the intuitions of reflective people are different for the seeing red vignette. Frederick 2005 Cognitive Reflection Test

44 Study A No correlation between participants Examine CRT whether score the and intuitions the answer of reflective to the people are different for the seeing red vignette. seeing red vignette (r(295), p>.35). Frederick 2005 Cognitive Reflection Test

45 Study B Examine whether the intuitions of people who have been primed to reflect are different for the seeing red vignette.

46 Study B No significant different between the mean answer of those receiving the Examine whether the intuitions of people who have been primed CRT to reflect before are different the seeing for red the seeing vignette red vignette. and those receiving it after (t(67), p>. 8).

47 Study C Examine whether the intuitions of people who have been primed to reflect are different for the seeing red vignette.

48 Study C No significant different between the mean answer of those receiving an Examine whether the intuitions of people who have been primed easy to reflect to read are seeing different red for vignette the seeing and red vignette. those receiving a difficult to read vignette (t(87), p>.7).

49 Upshot

50 An Additional Problem Conception of sthg How people think about a given situation Cause What people say about a situation Their language

51 Paul Jones was worried because it was 10 pm and his wife Mary was not home from work yet. Usually she is home by 6 pm. He tried her cell phone but just kept getting her voic . Starting to worry that something might have happened to her, he decided to call some local hospitals to ask whether any patient by the name of Mary Jones had been admitted that evening. At the University Hospital, the person who answered his call confirmed that someone by that name had been admitted with major but not lifethreatening injuries following a car crash. Paul grabbed his coat and rushed out to drive to University hospital. As it turned out, the patient at University Hospital was not Paul s wife, but another woman with the same name. In fact, Paul s wife had a heart attack as she was leaving work, and was at that moment receiving treatment in Metropolitan Hospital, a few miles away. Machery et al. Ms

52 Luke works in an office in New York with two other people, Victor and Monica. All winter Victor has been describing his plans to go to Las Vegas on his vacation, even showing Luke the website of the hotel where he has reservations. When Victor is away on vacation, Luke receives a very nice from Victor together with photos of Victor posing in front of Las Vegas landmarks. When he gets back to work, Victor talks a lot to Luke about how much fun he had vacationing in Las Vegas. However, Victor didn t really go on the trip; he has just been pretending. His tickets and reservations were cancelled because his credit card was maxed out, and he secretly stayed home in New York, very skillfully faking the photos he sent Luke. Meanwhile, Monica just spent a weekend vacationing in Las Vegas, but kept this a secret from all her co-workers. Machery et al. Ms

53 Formulation 1. When Paul rushed out to drive to University Hospital, did he know whether or not his wife was hospitalized? o Yes, he knew o No, he did not know Formulation 2. In your view, which of the following sentences better describes Paul s situation? o When Paul rushed out to drive to University Hospital, he knew that his wife was hospitalized. o When Paul rushed out to drive to University Hospital, he felt like he knew that his wife was hospitalized, but he did not actually know this. Machery et al. Ms

54 Machery et al. Ms

55 Machery et al. Ms

56 Plan 1. Getting the philosophical concept or view right. 2. How to compare the folk to philosophers? 3. How clear and distinct should we expect lay concepts to be?

57 A Concern Sometimes it may make little sense to expect lay people to share philosophers' abstract and refined concepts.

58 Free Will Compatibilism Free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism Incompatibilism Free will and responsibility are incompatible with determinism

59 Is Lay People's Concept of Free Will Compatibilist or Incompatibilist? 1. Ordinary people are compatibilists. 2. Ordinary people are incompatibilists. 3.Ordinary people are neither compatibilists nor incompatibilists.

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61 free will 66 responsibility 77

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63 abstract 16 concrete 72

64 Dubious Incompatibilism? Do people give apparently incompatibilist responses because they are incompatibilists or because they bring additional assumptions in their understanding of the scenarios?

65 Determinism vs. Fatalism Determinism Given initial conditions and laws of nature, the actual events necessarily occur. Fatalism The actual events necessarily occur whatever agents decide to do.

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68 Concern Does it make sense to expect lay people to have a concept of determinism that is distinct from fatalism?

69 Moral Expect lay people to make judgments that are characteristic of some philosophical view.

70 Characteristically consequentialist judgment Characteristically deontological judgment

71 Conclusion Three pitfalls: 1. Misunderstanding the philosophical concept 2. Mischaracterizing similarities and differences between lay and philosophical concepts 3. Expecting too much distinctness among lay concepts

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