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Causal Attributions and Corpus Analysis
... This is why even in recent papers (e.g. Hinton, 2020;Pease et al., 2019;Sytsma et al., 2019), philosophers still frame the exploration of corpus methods as a central contribution of their work, as if their contribution was still being assessed. ...
... Unlike studies in the first group, they are often interested in the genesis of concepts, which they often study using data from CHILDES Nichols et al., 2016;Nichols & Pinillos, 2018;Wright et al., 2016). They also typically use more varied methodologies, employing machine learning techniques like word vectors (Fischer et al., 2015;Sytsma et al., 2019) or clustering algorithms (Reuter et al., n.d.) or mixing in traditional experimental methods (e.g. Wright et al., 2016;Nichols et al., 2016;although Napolitano and Reuter (2021) also present vignette-based experiments). ...
... Of those 7, 4 made use of comparisons to control confounds (57%) and 6 made use of statistical tests (86%).14 For example,Sytsma et al. (2019) measured the positive/negative/neutral valence of words that were the object of the verb "to cause" in COCA. When they observed that the most frequent words were overwhelmingly negative, they looked at various synonymous verbs and expressions to see if the phenomenon was limited to "to cause" or if it was a more general feature of language.15 ...
Research in experimental philosophy has increasingly been turning to corpus methods to produce evidence for empirical claims, as they open up new possibilities for testing linguistic claims or studying concepts across time and culture. The present article reviews the quasi‐experimental studies that have been done using textual data from corpora in philosophy, with an eye for the modeling and experimental design that enable statistical inference. I find that most studies forego comparisons that could control for confounds, and that only a little less than half employ statistical testing methods to control for chance results. Furthermore, at least some researchers make modeling decisions that either do not take into account the nature of corpora and of the word‐concept relationship, or undermine the experiment's capacity to answer research questions. I suggest that corpus methods could both provide more powerful evidence and gain more mainstream acceptance by improving their modeling practices.
... good andMachery, 2007;Livengood et al., 2017). Other work has investigated causatives like "break" and "burn" (Rose et al., 2021;Schwenkler & Sievers, 2022) and potential synonyms of "cause" (Sytsma et al., 2019). The results so far seem to be mixed in that some authors highlight interesting differences, while others suggest that the differences are minor. ...
... As noted above, however, the conclusion that these results support mutual entailment assumes that people will tend to understand the responsibility attributions in our EC and REC statements as being normative. And while there is reason to expect this to be the case (Sytsma et al., 2019;Sytsma, 2022b), the claim is controversial. As we've seen, advocates of the standard view typically distinguish between a normative concept of responsibility (moral responsibility) and a descriptive concept (causal responsibility). ...
... And there is some reason to suspect that they do not. Thus, Sytsma et al. (2019) present corpus evidence suggesting that ordinary responsibility attributions are typically normative, while Sytsma (2022b) presents corpus evidence indicating that "morally responsible" is very rarely used. Expanding on this, we collected data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). ...
The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, the account of ordinary causal attributions put forward by Sytsma and Livengood predicts that “responsible for” and “caused” will generally be taken to apply in the same contexts. If the responsibility account is correct, then the reversal of the entailment claim may hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.
... In the recent empirical literature on causal judgment, some have proposed that the verb "cause" is distinctively tied to responsibility (e.g., Livengood et al., 2017;Sytsma, Bluhm, Willemsen, & Reuter, 2019). Summing up some of this research, Hitchcock (2007), writes: ...
... Of course, we didn't directly manipulate responsibility but instead manipulated whether the causal candidate was distal or proximal and whether the special causal verb was used in its simple form or periphrastically with "cause". But given the range of research suggesting that "cause" is semantically linked to responsibility (e.g., Livengood et al., 2017;Sytsma et al., 2011;Sytsma et al., 2019), we think it is reasonable to take the current findings, indirect as they are, as building upon that work. However, the more important point for our purposes is that this study shows that the notion of cause is not simply a more general relation that holds for all the specific relations indicated by special causal verbs. ...
... The word "cause" does seem to be importantly connected to teleology (Lombrozo, 2010;Rose, 2017) and responsibility (Sytsma et al., 2019). We built on these ideas in developing study 4. Insofar as identifying a person as a cause communicates responsibility for the effect, we hypothesized that a person might count as having broken something without having caused it to break. ...
... 5 Other methods like the cancellation paradigm (Willemsen & Reuter, 2021) corpus analysis (e.g. Hansen et al., 2021;Sytsma et al., 2019), eye tracking (e.g., , and statistical learning (Nichols, 2021) have entered the experimental-philosophical stage, which are usually not utilized to test for necessary features of concepts. 6 Recently, the philosophical study of salience has received some attention (see e.g., Archer, 2022;Michaelson & Nowak, 2022;Ratcliffe & Broome, 2022;Watzl, 2022;Whiteley, 2022). ...
... A second strand takes experimentalphilosophical studies to show huge variation in the reference of concepts between people on an individual level, as well as groups of people on a cultural level Reuter and Sytsma 2020;Weinberg et al. 2001). A third strand looks for additional methods to circumvent various problems with the method of cases, e.g., corpus-analytic approaches (Andow, 2015;Fischer et al., 2015;Hansen et al., 2021;Reuter, 2011;Sytsma et al., 2019). As a consequence of these objections, we find that many philosophers entertain a looser concept of conceptual analysis that is not tied to the classical theory of concepts, not tied to referentially invariant concepts, and not tied to the method of cases. ...
Semantic features are components of concepts. In philosophy, there is a predominant focus on those features that are necessary (and jointly sufficient) for the application of a concept. Consequently, the method of cases has been the paradigm tool among philosophers, including experimental philosophers. However, whether a feature is salient is often far more important for cognitive processes like memory, categorization, recognition and even decision-making than whether it is necessary. The primary objective of this paper is to emphasize the significance of researching salient features of concepts. I thereby advocate the use of semantic feature production tasks, which not only enable researchers to determine whether a feature is salient, but also provide a complementary method for studying ordinary language use. I will discuss empirical data on three concepts, conspiracy theory, female/male professor, and life, to illustrate that semantic feature production tasks can help philosophers (a) identify those salient features that play a central role in our reasoning about and with concepts, (b) examine socially relevant stereotypes, and (c) investigate the structure of concepts.
... 3 For further discussion of this point, see Schwenkler (Forthcoming). 4 Experimental philosophers have increasingly been calling on tools from corpus linguistics in recent years, treating corpora as a further source of evidence that can help with testing philosophical hypotheses about language. See Liao and Hansen (2022), Hansen et al. (2021), Sytsma et al. (2019), Caton (2020), and Ulatowski et al. (2020) for recent discussions and examples. ordinary use of our target terms. ...
... To help validate the insights we drew from the cluster analyses, we employed a further technique from corpus linguistics, looking at where our terms of interest were located in a semantic space built from another common, general-purpose corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American English). We used the best performing distributional semantic model from Sytsma et al. (2019) to check the nearest neighbors of our target terms in the semantic space-the terms that the model says are closest in meaning. The results were striking, with the most synonymous terms generated suggesting the dominant categories we arrived at. ...
The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy.
... While the use of corpus methods in philosophy dates back to at least the 1970's-e.g., Meuiner et al. (1976), McKinnon (1970); thanks to Louis Chartrand for making me aware of this work-their use has expanded in recent years. A non-exhaustive list of recent, English-language work in philosophy employing or discussing corpus methods broadly construed includes: Ludlow (2005), Meunier et al. (2005), de Villiers et al. (2007), Knobe and Prinz (2008), Wright and Bartsch (2008), Reuter (2011), Sainte-Marie et al. (2011), Slingerland and Chudek (2011), Herbelot et al. (2012), Bluhm (2013Bluhm ( , 2016, Nagel (2013Nagel ( , 2021, Overton (2013), Tallant (2013), Vetter (2014), Andow (2015aAndow ( , 2015b, Fischer et al. (2015, forthcoming), Liao et al. (2016), Nichols et al. (2016), Wright et al. (2016), Pence (2016, forthcoming), Ramsey and Pence (2016), Allen et al. (2017), Fischer and Engelhardt (2017), Hahn et al. (2017), Murdock et al. (2017), Schwitzgebel and Dicey Jennings (2017), Sytsma and Reuter (2017), Alfano et al. (2018), Nichols and Pinillos (2018), van Wierst et al. (2018), Pence and Ramsey (2018), Alfano and Cheong (2019), Betti et al. (2019), Malaterre et al. (2019Malaterre et al. ( , 2020, Mejía-Ramos et al. (2019), Pease et al. (2019), Sytsma et al. (2019), Caton (2020), Hinton (2020), Mizrahi (2020aMizrahi ( , 2020b forthcoming-a, forthcoming-b), Weatherson (2020), Gastaldi (2021), Nichols (2021), , Alfano (forthcoming), Allen and Murdock (forthcoming), Hansen et al. (forthcoming), Malaterre and Chartier (forthcoming), Nie (forthcoming), Sytsma (forthcoming-a), Tsugita et al. (forthcoming), Ginammi et al. (forthcoming), Bonino et al. (forthcoming), Transwell and Inglis (forthcoming), Lean et al. (forthcoming), Willemsen et al. (forthcoming), Sytsma and Snater (forthcoming), Mizrahi and Dickinson (2021). Ulatowski et al. (2020) note that "one advantage of corpus methods for experimental philosophy is that they can offer a further way to test our hypotheses, one free of some encumbrances common in more standard experimental contexts, even as it inevitably introduces others." ...
... One prominent response to this work has been to argue that this "norm effect" simply reflects experimental pragmatics, with participants inferring that the experimenters meant something like responsibility when they asked about causation (Samland and Waldmann 2016). In response, Sytsma et al. (2019) turn to corpus methods to make the case that the similarity between the use of "caused the" and "responsible for the" is found in ordinary English, outside of the experimental setting. reasonable inferences. ...
In this chapter I note two recent trends, one in experimental jurisprudence and one in experimental philosophy. First, some work in experimental jurisprudence has pushed for moving beyond textual sources, including the use of linguistic corpora, and toward questionnaire methods in analyzing ordinary meaning. Second, some work in experimental philosophy has urged that we should look to move beyond the use of questionnaire methods and toward the use of linguistic corpora in analyzing ordinary concepts. There is a methodological tension here that suggests further investigation. I do so by considering the legal hypothetical of a prohibition on vehicles in a park that has featured prominently in the back-and-forth over the use of corpus methods in legal interpretation. Taking a closer look at this example, including extending previous corpus analyses, I argue that corpus and questionnaire methods in fact paint a remarkably similar picture of the ordinary use of “vehicle.” I hold that this highlights how these methods can compliment each other, and conclude that when it comes to difficult empirical questions—such as those that arise in assessing ordinary meaning and ordinary concepts—we should aim to employ multiple sources of information to arrive at a consilience of evidence.
... Two analyses have been proposed. First, the evaluative content 1 More recently, researchers have identified another class of evaluative concepts, so-called dual character concepts (Knobe et al., 2013;Del Pinal & Reuter, 2017;Reuter, 2019;Reuter, Löschke, and Betzler 2020). Given that dual character concepts have two independent dimensions for categorization, we will not empirically investigate this class of concepts in this paper. ...
... Such an explanation would be consistent with a growing body of empirical evidence that has shown moral valence to have an effect on judgements of knowledge (Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010) and causation (Sytsma et al., 2019, for an overview see Willemsen & Kirfel, 2019). Additionally, the philosophical and linguistic literature is rife with results in which social norms seem to have an asymmetrical influence on praise and blame (Guglielmo & Malle, 2019). ...
Recent research on thick terms like 'rude' and 'friendly' has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like 'friendly' and 'courageous' can be more easily cancelled than the evaluative content of negative terms like 'rude' and 'selfish'. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick terms but also for thin terms such as 'good' or 'bad' (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect is indicative of a pervasive linguistic asymmetry that holds between positive and negative evaluative terms.
... But we would want very strong evidence indeed to accept such a conclusion, and currently there is no such evidence that I am aware of favoring one or the other of these views over the more charitable responsibility view. In fact, the present evidence otherwise supports the responsibility view over the bias view (Sytsma n.d.-c) and the pragmatic view (Sytsma et al. 2019). Knobe (2010, 320) notes that "people's ordinary application of a variety of different concepts can be influenced by moral considerations," including their causal attributions. ...
... See Sytsma et al. (2012);Livengood et al. (2017);Sytsma et al. (2019);Livengood and Sytsma (2020);Sytsma and Livengood (n.d.);Sytsma (n.d.-a, b, c, d). While discussions of the impact of injunctive norms on causal attributions often describe these in terms of moral judgments, this is arguably too strong. ...
There is ample evidence that violations of injunctive norms impact ordinary causal attributions. This has struck some as deeply surprising, taking the ordinary concept of causation to be purely descriptive. Our explanation of the findings—the responsibility view—rejects this: we contend that the concept is in fact normative, being akin to concepts like responsibility and accountability. Based on this account, we predicted a very different pattern of results for causal attributions when an agent violates a statistical norm. And this pattern has been borne out by the data (Sytsma et al. 2012, Livengood et al. 2017, Sytsma under review a). These predictions were based on the responsibility attributions that we would make. In this paper, I extend these previous findings, testing responsibility attributions. The results confirm the basis of our predictions, showing the same pattern of effects previously found for causal attributions for both injunctive norms and statistical norms. In fact, the results for responsibility attributions are not statistically significantly different from those previously found for causal attributions. I argue that this close correspondence lends further credence to the responsibility view over competing explanations of the impact of norms on causal attributions.
... We therefore decided to conduct a corpus study in which we investigated people's use of the terms 'rational' and 'irrational' by analyzing large amounts of texts. Such an approach avoids the shortcomings of questionnaire-based experimental methods, mainly because corpus studies observe people's use of terms in everyday contexts (for recent corpus-linguistic approaches to philosophical problems, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, see Sytsma et al. 2019, Reuter and Baumgartner 2024, and Chartrand 2022. ...
... Second, evidence suggests that when people do say 'cause' it is usually in relation to a special kind of causal process or result, while many paradigmatically causal processes are not spoken of in this way. Consider first a corpus study by Sytsma et al. (2019), which examined the nouns appearing after the phrase 'caused the …' (Wolff, 2003), Experiment 3 in a sample of sentences drawn from COCA. All of the ten nouns that appear most frequently after this phrase, and 30 of the top 50, were classified by independent raters as negative-suggesting that this phraseconstruction is used most often in connection with negative or undesired outcomes. ...
This paper is an essay in what Austin (Proc Aristotel Soc 57: 1–30, 1956–1957) called "linguistic phenomenology". Its focus is on showing how the grammatical features of ordinary causal verbs, as revealed in the kinds of linguistic constructions they can figure in, can shed light on the nature of the processes that these verbs are used to describe. Specifically, drawing on the comprehensive classification of English verbs founds in Levin (English verb classes and alternations: a preliminary investigation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993), I divide the forms of productive causal processes into five classes, corresponding to Aristotle's ontological categories: there are processes that cause change in location, in state, and in quantity; and that lead to the creation and destruction of substances. These broader categories are then subdivided into other ones, corresponding to different Levin classes, according to further differences in the causal processes they involve. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this argument to research in metaphysics and experimental philosophy.
... Thus, the picture of the relationship between OLP and X-Phi we will sketch in this chapter is going to be a friendly and intimate one, which is more than just a supplementary picture. Note that this kind of consideration is especially important today, in view of the recent trend of the use of corpus methods in X-Phi (e.g., Bluhm 2012, 2013, Sytsma, et al. 2019, Mejía-Ramos, et al. 2019, Ulatowski et al. forthcoming. See Bluhm 2016 for a brief overview), because of the obvious connection between this approach and OLP, 2 ...
This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general.
... This is not to say that corpus analysis is always superior to alternative methodologies, but it is to say that if there are ways in which it can help shed light on philosophical questions, we absolutely should take advantage of that. In recent times, others have attempted to do precisely this (Hansen et al. 2019;Sytsma et al. 2019;Liao and Hansen 2022), and this paper follows their lead to that extent. However, one distinctive aspect of this paper is in the claim that not only do corpus findings raise a challenge for the folk justification approach, but that corpus analysis can also help the folk justification approach to answer that challenge. ...
In this paper I use insights from exploratory analyses on large English language corpora to consider the extent to which there is a widely used ordinary notion of justification that attaches to beliefs. I will show that this has ramifications for one broad approach to theorising about justification – the folk justification approach. I will argue that the corpus-based findings presented pose a challenge to the folk justification approach insofar as they suggest that “justify” is not widely used talk about the justification of our beliefs. I will conclude by presenting the possible solutions to this challenge, and remarking on their feasibility.
... To help validate the insights we drew from the cluster analyses, we employed a further technique from corpus linguistics, looking at where our terms of interest were located in a semantic space built from another common, general-purpose corpora (Corpus of Contemporary American English). We used the best performing distributional semantic model from Sytsma et al. (2019) to check the nearest neighbors of our target terms in the semantic space-the terms that the model says are closest in meaning. The results were striking, with the most synonymous terms generated suggesting the dominant categories we arrived at. ...
The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy.
... For an example of a more qualitative approach to corpus analysis, seeSytsma et al. (2019). ...
Drawing on the epistemology of logic literature on anti-exceptionalism about logic, we set out to investigate the following metaphilosophical questions empirically: Is philosophy special? Are its methods (dis)continuous with science? More specifically, we test the following metaphilosophical hypotheses empirically: philosophical deductivism, philosophical inductivism, and philosophical abductivism. Using indicator words to classify arguments by type (namely, deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments), we searched through a large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (n = 435,703) to find patterns of argumentation. The results of our quantitative, corpus-based study suggest that deductive arguments are significantly more common than abductive arguments and inductive arguments in philosophical texts overall, but they are gradually and steadily giving way to non-deductive (i.e., inductive and abductive) arguments in academic philosophy.
... In order to illustrate the lack of consensus and to underline the importance of answering questions like those listed above, let us highlight just a few recent controversies. For instance: no consensus exists on whether legal concepts like constitutional and legal (see, e.g., Enoch & Toh, 2013;Topham, 2016), epistemic concepts like justified and knowledge (see, e.g., Kyle, 2013;Kotzee & Wanderer, 2008;Roberts, 2018;Väyrynen, 2021), emotional concepts like happy and afraid (see, e.g., Díaz & Reuter, 2020;Phillips et al., 2017), concepts linked to the domain of purity like dirty (see, e.g., Curry et al., 2019;Haidt, 2007), and other concepts like causation (Sytsma et al. 2019) and intention (Knobe 2003) that play a central role in philosophy and psychology, are evaluative concepts. There is also no consensus on whether and (if so) how many thick concepts demonstrate variability with respect to their evaluative component. ...
Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and to measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick adjectives like 'courageous' from descriptive adjectives like 'narrow', and from value-associated adjectives like 'sunny'. Our study reveals that the modifiers 'truly' and 'really' frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe the operationalization we suggest may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts.
... Corpus analysis itself can be conducted in both a qualitative and a quantitative manner (the latter allowing the usage of certain computational methods). For a philosophically-oriented discussion of these two types of corpus analysis, the way they can complement each other, and the way they can be used as an aid to the conceptual analysis that involves interaction with the speakers, see Sytsma et al. (2019). 16 For the whole analysis see (Bluhm, 2012). ...
Conceptual analysis as traditionally understood can be improved by allowing the use of a certain kind of empirical investigation. The conceptual analysis in which the kind of empirical investigation in question is used can be called “empirical conceptual analysis”. In the present inquiry, I provide a systematic exposition of empirical conceptual analysis, so understood, considering what exactly empirical conceptual analysis is, the different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis, and the main application of the method within philosophy. It can be defined as a method that consists in drawing a conclusion about the semantic application conditions of a predicate on the basis of observation of the manifestations of semantic intuitions. The different kinds of empirical conceptual analysis are distinguished according to the way the manifestations of semantic intuitions are observed. The main application of the method is solving conceptual disputes – situations in which different competent speakers of a language disagree about the semantic application conditions of a predicate from that language, and their disagreement is caused by the fact that they have different semantic intuitions about that predicate.
... In both cases, the person was described as experiencing the psychological states associated with a descriptive notion of happiness: High levels of positive affect, low levels of negative affect, and high life satisfaction. For example: 3 While some people have argued that the concept of cause might be inherently normative (Sytsma, Bluhm, Willemsen & Reuter, 2019), others have merely argued that the application of the concept cause is influenced by normative information (Alicke, 1992). 4 Note, however, that some studies (Chituc, 2012) have argued that the concept of happiness belongs to the class of a dual-character concept and hence has a normative dimension for categorization. ...
It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way.
What is the folk concept of art? Does it track any of the major definitions of art philosophers have proposed? In two preregistered experiments (N = 888) focusing on two types of artworks (paintings and musical works), we manipulate three potential features of artworks: intentional creation, the possession of aesthetic value, and institutional recognition. This allows us to investigate whether the folk concept of art fits an essentialist definition drawing on one or more of the manipulated factors or whether it might be a disjunctive or cluster concept. The results suggest that none of the three manipulated properties alone suffices for an object to be considered art. The folk concept of art might thus well be a cluster concept instead of an essentialist concept.
What is pain? Perhaps surprisingly the standard answer to this question among philosophers does not derive from research in biology or other sciences but from claims about common sense and thought experiments intended to draw out our intuitions about the nature of pain. This raises a number of issues, among them the question of whether philosophers’ claims about the commonsense conception of pain are accurate. In this chapter, I’ll explore some of the empirical research that has been done on this question in recent years, focusing on the claim that common sense tells us that there can be no unfelt pains. In doing so, I’ll walk through several sets of studies, introducing the empirical research process and illustrating the use of one type of statistical tool—t-tests.
Corpus analysis allows researchers to inform, illuminate, and investigate many problems. This chapter provides easy access to some of the central tools commonly used in corpus linguistics. After a short exploration of pre-built corpora and a brief literature review surveying corpus-analytic studies in philosophy, we illustrate these tools by running several corpus analyses on the term “conspiracy theory.” These analyses show that “conspiracy theory” is a strongly evaluative term. The reader of this chapter can follow each of the steps of the corpus analyses using the online material that is freely available.
Surveys are the most widely used research tool in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I analyze two types of criticism of the questionnaire method put forward in the literature. The first type is metaphilosophical. It asserts that the surveys used by experimental philosophers are based on a flawed and unproductive method of cases. The second type is methodological. It argues that currently used questionnaires are unfit to measure philosophically relevant phenomena. I show that these objections can be met by a) improving questionnaires used in research practice and b) expanding the methodological repertoire of experimental philosophy.
Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word in non-academic, academic, and philosophical discourse. In non-academic discourse, uses that refer to knowledge or sources of knowledge, and to public events, are found to dominate. Uses that refer to mental states or episodes dominate only in the philosophy of mind (and not even in philosophy at large).
Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive and moral disputes surrounding hate speech laws—in particular, surrounding their compatibility with the rule of law, democracy, and free speech—depend crucially on the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Next, we argue, drawing on recent developments in legal philosophy, that corpus linguistics constitutes a distinctively promising tool for ascertaining the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Finally, we offer a proof of concept, by outlining, and analyzing the interpretive and moral implications of, the first such study.
Few studies have investigated translation of euphemism in the Holy Quran. Hence, the aim of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of strategies used by translators when translating euphemistic expressions found in the Holy Quran. This study has analyzed and classified strategies proposed by Sahih International, Yusuf Ali, Shakir, Mohsin Khan, Pickthall, Muhammad Sarwar and Arberry when translating Quranic euphemism. To perform this analysis, all euphemized Quranic verses related to the selected topics-blindness, mutism, deafness, and vitiligo-have been collected and then run through the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com) to determine the incongruities of the translations. The study has revealed that strategies used can be categorized into four types: 1) literal translation, 2) substitution, 3) plain language, and 4) a combination of two strategies. It has been found that Quranic euphemism was not accurately rendered in the English language, as the most used strategy was plain language, and this was followed by literal translation in most cases.
Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judg- ments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N = 1000) and norms of proper functioning (N = 3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed.
Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6).
This chapter presents two cross-linguistic studies of knowledge-how attributions that compare English and Japanese speakers. The first study investigates the felicity judgements of ordinary people about knowledge-how sentences, where we find a large difference in judgements about the sentences in which a person lacks an ability to perform a certain action but is nevertheless attributed the relevant knowledge of how to perform that action. The second study investigates the frequency of the natural occurrences of knowing-how constructions in English and Japanese through Google search and corpora, where we find virtually no natural occurrence of Japanese knowing-how constructions. These results suggest that the attribution of knowledge-how in Japanese is radically different from the English counterpart in that it neither requires nor is required by the relevant physical ability. We then explore the philosophical implications of these radical differences in the use of knowing-how constructions between English and Japanese speakers for the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. One such implication is that English “know how” sentences themselves may not delineate a philosophically significant category of knowledge.
One body of research in experimental philosophy indicates that non-philosophers by and large do not employ the concept of phenomenal consciousness. Another body of research, however, suggests that people treat phenomenal consciousness as essential for having free will. In this chapter, we explore the tension between these findings. We suggest that the dominant, ordinary usages of ‘consciousness’ concern notions of being awake, aware, and exercising control, all of which bear a clear connection to free will. Based on this, we argue that findings purporting to show that people take the capacity for phenomenal consciousness to be necessary for free will are better interpreted in terms of a non-phenomenal understanding of consciousness. We explore this suggestion by calling on extant work on the dimensions of mind perception, and we expand on it, presenting the results of a new study employing a global sample.
Are the cognitive sciences relevant for law? How do they influence legal theory and practice? Should lawyers become part-time cognitive scientists? The recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of human decision-making and behavior. Many claim, for instance, that we can no longer view ourselves as purely rational agents equipped with free will. This change is vitally important for lawyers, who are forced to rethink the foundations of their theories and the framework of legal practice. Featuring multidisciplinary scholars from around the world, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of law and the cognitive sciences. It develops new theories and provides often provocative insights into the relationship between the cognitive sciences and various dimensions of the law including legal philosophy and methodology, doctrinal issues, and evidence.
Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity.
This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise.
In this paper, we consider two competing explanations of the empirical finding that people’s causal attributions are responsive to normative details, such as whether an agent’s action violated an injunctive norm—the counterfactual view and the responsibility view. We then present experimental evidence that uses the trolley dilemma in a new way to investigate causal attribution. In the switch version of the trolley problem, people judge that the agent ought to flip the switch, but they also judge that she is more responsible for the resulting outcome when she does so than when she refrains. As predicted by the responsibility view, but not the counterfactual view, people are more likely to say that the agent caused the outcome when she flips the switch.
We investigate claims about the frequency of “know” made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in their “armchairs of an afternoon”, to use J.L. Austin's phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of “know” that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing.
Many theories of actual causation implicitly endorse the claim that if c is an actual cause of e, then either c causes e directly or every intermediary by which c indirectly causes e is itself both an actual cause of e and also an actual effect of c. We think this compositionality constraint is plausible. However, as we show, it is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make. After showing that the compositionality constraint is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make, we step back to consider what philosophers working on causation should do when the deliverances of their theories diverge from what ordinary people say.
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