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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Lessons From the Park
« on: 2005-09-10 08:31:15 » |
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[Blunderov] Experimental philosophy.
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i02/02a01103.htm
Best Regards.
<snip>
Lessons From the Park
By ROBIN WILSON
Chatting with people in a public park about a hypothetical profit-hungry
executive is not the way philosophers usually gain their insights.
But it is how Joshua Knobe, a newly minted Ph.D. from Princeton University,
has rocked the philosophical establishment and earned a place at the leading
edge of the discipline in a new field called "experimental philosophy."
The field uses the empirical tools of psychology to address philosophical
questions, designing experiments to test how ordinary people think. It is in
stark contrast to how philosophers have typically operated -- sitting in a
proverbial armchair while pondering human thought.
Not only is Mr. Knobe (one syllable, with a silent K) a pioneer in the
experimental method, but his work has also reached conclusions that
challenge philosophers' long-held views on human intuition and morality.
"He went out and designed these very clever experiments and started getting
these results that put an entire part of the philosophical landscape on its
ear," says Stephen Stich, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at
Rutgers University at New Brunswick. "It is hard from the outside to
appreciate how startling his findings were." By Mr. Stich's estimates, they
are the kind of discovery a scholar considers himself lucky to come across
once every 10 years.
And Mr. Knobe, 31, has barely started his first tenure-track job. He will
begin teaching philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
this fall.
Mr. Knobe has already published 18 papers in edited books and peer-reviewed
journals. Even more impressive, a forthcoming issue of the Journal of
Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology will be entirely devoted to
scholars' responses to his experiments involving human intuition and
morality.
The work earned Mr. Knobe eight on-campus job interviews this spring, and
five offers. He turned down jobs at Georgia State University, the State
University of New York at Buffalo, and the Universities of Arizona and
Massachusetts at Amherst.
Brian Leiter, who writes the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a popular online
ranking of U.S. philosophy programs, calls Mr. Knobe "a phenom." The two met
a few years ago when Mr. Knobe was deciding where to enroll in graduate
school, and they are now working together on an essay about Nietzsche's
moral psychology.
Says Mr. Leiter: "He sees how results in psychology bear on philosophical
questions and he's found ways to test claims about our intuitions, holding
philosophers' feet to the empirical fire."
Socratic Inspiration
Mr. Knobe remembers being introduced to philosophy by a graduate student who
worked with the after-school program he attended while growing up as an only
child in Lexington, Mass.
"She would take me aside and say, 'There is this man Socrates and he would
go up to people in the streets and try to engage them and talk about the
meaning of life,'" recalls Mr. Knobe, who acknowledges that he was intrigued
but barely understood any of what the graduate student said.
In high school, he was most interested in moral psychology. "What is the
psychological reason we have these views and not others?" Mr. Knobe says he
wanted to know. "What is it about us that makes us think, This is right?"
When Stanford University accepted Mr. Knobe as an undergraduate, he set off
across the country on his bike. While the physical challenge was a bonus,
says Mr. Knobe, he took the six-week trip primarily because it gave him
uninterrupted time to think.
At Stanford, Mr. Knobe created his own major in ethics so he could study
questions of morality from philosophical, religious, historical,
psychological, and other perspectives. He even learned German so he could
read the original work of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
And he became a research assistant to a Stanford graduate student doing
experiments in social psychology. The work trained Mr. Knobe to perform the
kind of philosophical experiments he began conducting during his second year
in Princeton's doctoral program.
"I decided to put stuff to the test by going out and talking to people about
it," he says.
He approached people in New York City's Washington Square Park, asking them
to read two short paragraphs about a profit-hungry corporate leader who
wants to pursue a certain business strategy. In the first example, the
businessman is told that a side effect of the strategy is that it will harm
the environment. But the businessman says he doesn't care, and sure enough,
when he pursues the strategy, the environment is harmed.
In the second example, the businessman is told that a side effect of his
strategy is that the environment will be helped. He says he doesn't care,
and sure enough, when he pursues the strategy the environment is helped.
After each scenario, Mr. Knobe asked people: Did the corporate leader
intentionally harm the environment? Did he intentionally help it?
Philosophers have reasoned that questions of whether someone did something
intentionally are entirely about the actor's state of mind. When asked these
hypothetical questions, conventional wisdom says most people would agree the
corporate leader did not intentionally help or harm the environment.
But Mr. Knobe found that people's views of intentions depend on the outcome.
People in the park said that the businessman did not intentionally help the
environment, but that he did intentionally harm it.
'Groundbreaking' Work
"Joshua went out and did these experiments, showing that at least one
common-sense psychological concept -- doing something intentionally -- isn't
really a descriptive concept, it's a moral concept," says Mr. Stich. "Part
of people's judgments about whether you act intentionally is what they take
to be the moral status of what you've done."
Since Mr. Knobe started his experiments, a few years ago, some psychologists
and philosophers have written articles suggesting that his findings may be
false. In response, Mr. Knobe has altered the experiments accordingly, but
has still reached the same conclusions.
Although the work and the widespread attention it has received has set Mr.
Knobe apart from most other new Ph.D.'s, he doesn't act as if he is
particularly special.
"The way lots of people were trained in philosophy is gladiatorial," says
Shaun B. Nichols, a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah who
has worked with Mr. Knobe. "You are supposed to show how smart you are by
meeting all comers. Joshua doesn't have that."
Lately, Mr. Knobe has turned his attention to values and the way we form
them. He has devised a hypothetical scenario about a young woman and
premarital sex. But he won't be doing his experiments from an office or an
armchair. Before he starts teaching this fall in Chapel Hill, Mr. Knobe has
gone back to talk to people in the park. </snip>
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Hermit
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RE: virus: Lessons From the Park
« Reply #1 on: 2005-09-10 14:09:37 » |
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[Blunderov quoted] "Joshua went out and did these experiments, showing that at least one common-sense psychological concept -- doing something intentionally -- isn't really a descriptive concept, it's a moral concept," says Mr. Stich. "Part of people's judgments about whether you act intentionally is what they take to be the moral status of what you've done."
[Hermit] I think that it might be interesting to run the same experiments in other parks in other parts of the world. More interesting perhaps, to ask other questions, more and less loaded with political correctness (both here and abroad). Most interesting, it might be sensible to ask somebody, any philosopher, rather than Mr Stich, for an evaluation of the experiment.
[Hermit] I say this largely (but not only) because I disagree with Mr Stich's assertion, "Part of people's judgments about whether you act intentionally is what they take to be the moral status of what you've done."
[Hermit] Leaving aside the issue of what morality is (what you were taught along with your mother's milk perhaps), as opposed to the, I would suggest more appropriate phrasing, ethical status, where the evaluation of relative harms (actual and potential) is required, evaluation of likelihood and relative harms is not what is needed to differentiate between what is said and what is done in these questions, only an evaluation of likelihood.
[Hermit] It seems to me that the park respondents evaluated the first case appropriately despite the subterfuge of "the businessman says he doesn't care" and the implicit equivocation that this is equivalent to a denial of intent. This is, after all, the way the courts have dealt with intent since it first became an important component in determining culpability. Had the the "profit-hungry corporate leader" been up on trial for the crime of "harming the environment" (and as everyone is in the environment, not incidentally, harming everyone) not only would he likely be found guilty of the actual damage (unless he had made significant contributions to the ruling party's election chest), in sentencing, the case would be found to have aggravating factors, both because he knew the probable consequences before hand and because he ignored them in order that he might profit in the face of his neighbors.
[Hermit] Clearly, in this example, a straightforward ethical evaluation, i.e. who benefited and who was harmed is appropriate and occurred when the hypothetical businessman was hypothetically warned about the hypothetical damage to the hypothetical environment by his hypothetical lust for profits. The supposed harm was a predictable consequence of instantiating a program to satiate the "hunger for profits" irrespective of who - and what - was harmed getting there. The salivating businessman was informed that the environment would be harmed and his response indicated that he accepted this evaluation as true."In the first example, the businessman is told that a side effect of the strategy is that it will harm the environment. But the businessman says he doesn't care, and sure enough, when he pursues the strategy, the environment is harmed." Evidently, his positive intent for profits resulted in his holding a negative intent for the environment. His assertion that he did not care one way or the other was clearly contradicted by his actions, which reflected the conclusion that his profits were more important than the environment (and others). A previous ethical judgment on the part of the hypothetical actor. The park respondents merely had to identify this, recognize the irrelevance of the purportedly exculpatory verbiage and provide the answer that "intent to harm the environment" had been present.
[Hermit] In alternative scenarios, it is perhaps worth noting that the foregoing negative "intent" could only have been reduced, i.e. not eliminated, had "the businessman" not weykened that "a side effect of the strategy is that it will harm the environment.". The fact that a "reasonable person" (somebody not involved) determined that the environment could be harmed would still suggest that at least some aspect of "profit at any cost" permeated both his evaluations and his actions should his actions result in harm to the environment.
[Hermit] On the other hand, if the harm had not occurred, if the environment had not been harmed, no legal intent could have been formed, and we would be evaluating "only" a "philosophical intent" - where I would still say that all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, an intent to harm the environment had been formed - predicated on the fact that acquiring the desired profits was presumptively conditional on causing harm to the "environment" . In other words, the businessman evaluated the potential profits with the potential harm and decided in favor of profits - his intent was to ignore harm done to the environment so that he could profit at cost to the environment – no matter what else he may have said about it.
[Hermit] On the other hand, in the second case, there was no harm, potential or actual. The "profit-hungry corporate leader" gets his profits, the environment, and thus his presumably non (or at least less) profit hungry peers are benefited, and an ethical-legal evaluation is unnecessary. We are left evaluating only the intent of the corporate leader to profit, not to "intentionally harm" or even to "intentionally help the environment." Those evaluating the case, were, I submit correct again. In this instance, no intent, positive or negative, was formed.
[Hermit] I suggest that most rational, reasonably well educated people should have been able to predict these results. The third chimp shares with its cousins a finely honed cheating discrimination circuit (cf e.g. http://paws.wcu.edu/mccord/Detecting%20Cheaters.htm). The question as framed should have, and apparently did, trigger this in the first example and again correctly, should not have and did not in the second, yielding the results described. Perhaps the inability to see that this is the case is indicative of a pathological condition. What I don’t comprehend is how any other results are possible – or indeed, how a "philosopher", even Mr Stich, could possibly conclude from the description of the experiment that "Part of people's judgments about whether you act intentionally is what they take to be the moral status of what you've done." Given, "his work has also reached conclusions that challenge philosophers' long-held views on human intuition and morality" perhaps we should attempt to determine if this is an accurate statement – and if it is, question whether the philosophers characterized here all suffer from pathological conditions.
Hermit
PS If the answers given by the populace are determined by "moral" judgements, then it should be possible to invert the answers by exchanging the perceived desireability of the outcomes. How would you phrase those test questions?
PPS As an excercise for the student, it is quite easy to create stories which falsely trigger the "cheat detector" and thus yield incorrect answers which are indeed "instinctive" - and show-up our instinctive or gut reactions as stupid - but that is not what this article was about.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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