Shaun Nichols

Cornell University | CU · Sage School of Philosophy

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) has been an influential thesis since the earliest stages of western philosophy. According to a simple version of the PSR, for every fact, there must be an explanation of that fact. In the present research, we investigate whether people presuppose a PSR-like principle in ordinary judgment. Across five studies...

The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberri...

Parochial norms are narrow in social scope, meaning they apply to certain groups but not to others. Accounts of norm acquisition typically invoke tribal biases: from an early age, people assume a group's behavioral regularities are prescribed and bounded by mere group membership. However, another possibility is rational learning: given the availabl...

Political philosophy asks questions of great importance to our lives, both as individuals and members of political communities: What is justice? What does the state owe to its citizens? Under which conditions are different forms of government likely to be stable? The relevance of empirical research to such questions, however, has been largely under...

Using a framework from recent metaphysics and philosophy of science, according to which we have two concepts of cause, producer and necessary condition, we investigate causal notions in Antiphon’s Second Tetralogy, which concerns the unintentional homicide of a boy by a javelin-throwing youth. The prosecution maintains that the youth, having produc...

It is well-known that people will adjust their first-order beliefs based on observations of others. We explore how such adjustments interact with second-order beliefs regarding universalism and relativism in a population. Across a range of simulations, we show that populations where individuals have a tendency toward universalism converge more quic...

It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nati...

Harmful acts are punished more often and more harshly than harmful omissions. This asymmetry has variously been ascribed to differences in how individuals perceive the causal responsibility of acts versus omissions and to social norms that tend to proscribe acts more frequently than omissions. This paper examines both of these hypotheses, in conjun...

People often feel guilt for accidents-negative events that they did not intend or have any control over. Why might this be the case? Are there reputational benefits to doing so? Across six studies, we find support for the hypothesis that observers expect "false positive" emotions from agents during a moral encounter - emotions that are not normativ...

People seem to regard some norms (e.g., about the wrongness of armed robbery) as universally true, and other norms (e.g., about which side of the road to drive on) as true relativized to some context or group. This chapter considers whether such meta-evaluative beliefs are rational. There are reasons to doubt that the belief in universalism about n...

To what extent is morality based on reason? To answer this question, we need to clarify which aspect of morality is under investigation, and which notion of reason is in play. Recent work in moral psychology has attempted to debunk central aspects of moral judgment and metaethical judgment. However, rational processes might play a vital role in the...

Moral systems, like normative systems more broadly, involve complex mental representations. Rational Rules offers an account of the acquisition of key aspects of normative systems in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. In particular, it offers statistical learning accounts of: (1) how people come to think that a rule is act-based...

Is morality prewired into our minds? The idea that morality is built into us is an old one in philosophy, and it has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. If the statistical learning accounts I’ve defende...

The fundamental element of a cognitive account of moral judgment will be some form of representation. Two kinds of value representations need to be distinguished: value representations and rule representations. Value representations register valence for particular courses of action. For instance an organism might represent touching a certain wire a...

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe dete...

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe dete...

It's a familiar point in anthropology that many norms are parochial, meaning they apply to people in certain groups (e.g., one's ingroup) and not to others (e.g., one's outgroup). One explanation for such parochialism is that people are just innately biased against outsiders. But it's also possible that, given the evidence, people infer the parochi...

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non‐living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, i...

The idea that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we argue that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the possibility that indeterminist metaphysical views inappropriately affect how...

One way that cognitive science can inform our metaphysical views is by explaining why we have the metaphysical views that we do. Psychological explanations can serve to debunk our intuitive metaphysical commitments when the commitments derive from an epistemically defective process. But psychological explanations can also serve to vindicate our int...

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elabor...

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta‐ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta‐normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicati...

When people learn normative systems, they do so based on limited evidence. Many of the possible actions that are available to an agent have never been explicitly permitted or prohibited. But people will often need to figure out whether those unspecified actions are permitted or prohibited. How does a learner resolve this incompleteness? The learner...

Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in t...

Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. But while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra‐domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypot...

Even those who demure from this consensus readily acknowledge that it is the default view.

Occam's razor—the idea that all else being equal, we should pick the simpler hypothesis—plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. But why are simpler hypotheses better? One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam's razor (BOR) is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible—they can accommodate a wider range of pos...

This is a reply to discussions by Robert Kane, Kelly McCormick, and Manuel Vargas of Shaun Nichols, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsibility.

When people reason on the basis of moral rules, do they suppose that in the absence of a prohibitory rule they are free to act, or do they suppose that morality always requires a justification establishing a permission to act? In this essay we present a series of learning experiments that indicate when learners tend to close their system on the bas...

Over the last several decades, there has been a wealth of illuminating work on processes implicated in social cognition. Much less has been done in articulating how we learn the contours of particular concepts deployed in social cognition, like the concept MENTALISTIC AGENT. Recent developments in learning theory afford new tools for approaching th...

Previous studies on rule learning show a bias in favor of act-based rules, which prohibit intentionally producing an outcome but not merely allowing the outcome. Nichols, Kumar, Lopez, Ayars, and Chan (2016) found that exposure to a single sample violation in which an agent intentionally causes the outcome was sufficient for participants to infer t...

People draw subtle distinctions in the normative domain. But it remains unclear exactly what gives rise to such distinctions. On one prominent approach, emotion systems trigger non-utilitarian judgments. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. In this article, we...

This chapter highlights the common practice of appealing to lay intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories of free will. These arguments often seem to assume that the purported intuitions in question are not results of error, and the purported intuitions are generalizable to some interesting extent. Some empirical investigations of these two...

One of the central debates in the philosophy of language is that between defenders of the causal-historical and descriptivist theories of reference. Most philosophers involved in the debate support one or the other of the theories (or perhaps some combination of them). Building on recent experimental work in semantics, we argue that there is a sens...

How might advanced neuroscience-in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible-interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and import...

Many cognitive scientists take it for granted that concepts like CAT (mental terms that are expressed with single nouns) can be learned by observing a co-occurrence in superficial properties, such as having fur, being 4-legged, and tending to purr, and then building a complex category representation from representations for those superficial proper...

Psychological evidence detailing why we believe what we believe can provide a powerful basis for challenging the warrant of those beliefs. If psychology shows that a certain common belief derives from epistemically defective processes, then this threatens to undercut the epistemic authority of the belief. The canonical case of this sort of debunkin...

In this essay, two different forms of debunking arguments are distinguished. On the type of debunking argument that I will promote, one attempts to undercut the justificatory status of a belief by showing that the belief was formed by an epistemically defective psychological process. I argue that there is a promising application of such a process d...

This book contains fourteen chapters-thirteen previously published and one new-that reflect the fast-moving changes in the field of experimental philosophy over the last five years. Experimental philosophy is one of the most innovative and exciting parts of the current philosophical landscape; it has also engendered controversy. Proponents argue th...

According to the discontinuity view, people recognize a deep discontinuity between phenomenal and intentional states, such that they refrain from attributing feelings and experiences to entities that do not have the right kind of body, though they may attribute thoughts to entities that lack a biological body, like corporations, robots, and disembo...

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a...

Retributivist accounts of punishment maintain that it is right to punish wrongdoers, even if the punishment has no future benefits. Research in experimental economics indicates that people are willing to pay to punish defectors. A complementary line of work in social psychology suggests that people think that it is right to punish wrongdoers. This...

The experimental study of ethical judgment has blossomed into a thriving research area. Philosophers, psychologists, and scientists from other experimental fields have investigated a wide range of phenomena associated with human morality. Some of this work has focused on metaethical questions concerning the character and psychological nature of mor...

According to dual-process theories, moral judgments are the result of two competing processes: a fast, automatic, affect-driven process and a slow, deliberative, reason-based process. Accordingly, these models make clear and testable predictions about the influence of each system. Although a small number of studies have attempted to examine each pr...

This article appeals to experimental studies in order to elucidate the reactions of ordinary persons to the picture of the human mind that is prevalent in contemporary cognitive science. According to this prevalent cognitivescientific picture, the mind is made up of states and processes that interact according to certain rules to generate specific...

Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity—the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity de...

We have recently presented evidence for cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be...

Consciousness often presents itself as a problem for materialists because no matter which physical explanation we consider, there seems to remain something about conscious experience that hasn't been fully explained. This gives rise to an apparent explanatory gap . The explanatory gulf between the physical and the conscious is reflected in the broa...

Evidence from experimental philosophy indicates that people think that their choices are not determined. What remains unclear is why people think this. Denying determinism is rather presumptuous given people's general ignorance about the nature of the universe. In this paper, I'll argue that the belief in indeterminism depends on a default presumpt...

Don't trust your instincts about free will or consciousness, experimental philosophers say

Recent work proclaims a dominant role for automatic, intuitive, and emotional processes in producing ordinary moral judgment, despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about moral judgment “in the wild.” Indirect support comes via an assumption of dual-process theory: that conscious, reasoning processes are resource intensive. We argue t...

This paper proposes the 'AGENCY model' of conscious state attribution, according to which an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g. eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) automatically triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. To test the model's predictions, participants completed a speede...

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism w...

A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection (e.g. Nisbett and Wilson, 1977; Gopnik, 1993; Wegner, 2002). Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental even...

Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions...

Moral judgments, we expect, ought not to depend on luck. A person should be blamed only for actions and outcomes that were under the person's control. Yet often, moral judgments appear to be influenced by luck. A father who leaves his child by the bath, after telling his child to stay put and believing that he will stay put, is judged to be morally...

In The Grammar of Society, Bicchieri maintains that behavior in the Ultimatum game (and related economic games) depends on people's allegiance to 'social norms'. In this article, I follow Bicchieri in maintaining that an adequate account of people's behavior in such games must make appeal to norms, including a norm of equal division; I depart from...

This chapter surveys empirical evidence linking emotions to moral judgments and describes several processing models that are consistent with these data. It then considers the question of which particular emotions are involved in moral judgment, and suggests a way to distinguish moral and non-moral emotions that does not require a cognitive theory o...

Is it wrong to torture prisoners of war for fun? Is it wrong to yank on someone’s hair with no provocation? Is it wrong to push an innocent person in front of a train in order to save five innocent people tied to the tracks? If you are like most people, you answered "yes " to each of these questions. A venerable account of human moral judgment, inf...

To understand the nature of moral motivation, it is important first to understand the nature of motivation. This chapter begins with a discussion of motivation itself and then sketches four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories. It then evaluates these theories in...

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions abou...

Williams (197046. Williams , B . 1970. The self and the future. The Philosophical Review, 79: 161–180. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's...

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about...

Carruthers' arguments depend on a tenuous interpretation of cases from the confabulation literature. Specifically, Carruthers maintains that cases of confabulation are "subjectively indistinguishable" from cases of alleged introspection. However, in typical cases of confabulation, the self-attributions are characterized by low confidence, in contra...

Thought experiments about the self seem to lead to deeply conflicting intuitions about the self. Cases imagined from the 3,person perspective. This paper argues that recent cognitive theories of the imagination, coupled with standard views about indexical concepts, help explain our reactions in the 1 st person cases. The explanation helps identify...

∗When making moral judgments, people are typically guided by a plurality of moral rules. These rules owe their existence to human emotions but are not simply equivalent to those emotions. And people’s moral judgments ought to be guided by a plurality of emotion-based rules. The view just stated combines three positions on moral judgment: [1] moral...

Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic experiments to reach a better understanding of people’s ordinary intuitions about philosophica...

Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic experiments to reach a better understanding of people’s ordinary intuitions about philosophica...

This chapter offers an introductory overview of freedom and determinism. It contemplates common objections to determinism (presumed fatalism, denial of free choice, and negation of praise, blame, and responsibility). It identifies psychology's challenges to free will (evolutionary influences, genetic influences, brain control, parental/peer/cultura...

Neil Levy's provocative paper raises a number of fascinating issues. Here we want to focus on just one of these—the role of principles concerning fairness in his basic argument that we should not punish psychopaths. For present purposes, we will simply go along with Levy's claim that psychopaths lack moral knowledge (but see Vargas and Nichols [200...

This chapter first explains why folk psychology has played such an important role in recent philosophy of mind. It then distinguishes two different accounts of folk psychology, and argues that functionalists should prefer the mindreading account on which folk psychology is the rich body of information or theory that underlies people's skill in attr...

From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism. Libertarianism seemed delusional, and compatibilism seemed in bad faith. Hence I threw my lot in with philosophers like Paul d'Holbach, Galen Strawson, and Derk Pereboom who...

The dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists must be one of the most persistent and heated deadlocks in Western philosophy. Incompatibilists maintain that people are not fully morally responsible if determinism is true, i.e., if every event is an inevitable consequence of the prior conditions and the natural laws. By contrast

Recent work in developmental psychology indicates that children naturally think that psychological states continue after death. One important candidate explanation for why this belief is natural appeals to the idea that we believe in immortality because we can't imagine our own nonexistence. This paper explores this old idea. To begin, I present a...

Incompatibilists about free will and responsibility often maintain that incompatibilism is the intuitive, commonsense position (e.g., Kane 1999, Strawson 1986). Recently, this claim has come under unfavorable scrutiny from naturalistic philosophers who have surveyed philosophically uneducated undergraduates (e.g. Nahmias et al. forthcoming; Woolfol...

Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people's intuitions about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how 'intentional' gets interpreted. That is, in Knobe's cases, different people interp...