Experimental Philosophy

There hasn't been enough attention to this amazing result, and I'd love to hear ideas about how to explain it Participants are given a story about a morally bad behavior and told that it is due to genetics. Then they are asked the simplest possible question: Is it due to genetics?

In other words, the answer to the question is already given explicitly within the study materials. People are told that a bad behavior is due to genetics and then asked whether it is due to genetics Yet, amazingly, many participants say "No"! They explicitly reject the whole premise

Causal modeling fans! Tadeg Quilien has an amazing new app that implements a few different theories about how people make causal strength judgments. You specify a model, and it calculates what each theory predicts about people’s judgments

The app is here : tadegquillien.shinyapps.io/causaljudgme... And here is his blog post about how to use it: xphi.net/2026/10/10/a... @tadegquillien.bsky.social

I am still just SO excited that Felipe De Brigard (@felipedebrigard.bsky.social) got a MacArthur Genius Grant! He has done so much amazing work in experimental philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and a million other fields, and it's absolutely wonderful to see him getting recognized like this

There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵

Not only do philosophers attribute knowledge differently from ordinary folks, they attribute knowledge differently from *all other academics*

There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵

Similarly, people are happy to attribute knowledge in Gettier cases when the outcome is something morally bad

There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵

In “high stakes” cases, ordinary people are still inclined to attribute knowledge In fact, they attribute knowledge even in the exact high stakes cases that have been most discussed in philosophy (e.g., “bank cases”)

There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵

What the studies keep showing, again and again, is that ordinary folks are happy to attribute knowledge in cases where philosophers would deny knowledge The ordinary concept *does not* seem to involve all of the complex conditions that philosophers have invoked in their theories

Imagine an LLM that behaves like a person in some ways but runs on completely different physical stuff (microchips instead of a biological brain). Would this LLM be conscious? There is a lot of experimental philosophy research on precisely this question markmphelan.github.io/papers/consc...

One view: People are more likely to attribute consciousness to an entity when it is EMBODIED - i.e., when it has a biological body In experimental philosophy, there's a big debate about whether this view is true, with lots of intriguing evidence on each side

Philosopher @nathansen.bsky.social has created a website that uses AI to take people through a Socratic dialogue about a philosophical thought experiment I gave it a try. In my opinion, it really does help users think through these questions www.ux-phi.com/experiments

Here are some screenshots from my session I am pretty impressed. This thing is asking questions that feel a lot like the questions that philosophers typically ask students in classes

Many of you will know the famous finding from @existwell.bsky.social and Derek Anderson: Philosophers' views on philosophical questions are not predicted by their personality traits But why not? I asked Anderson about this, and he had a very intriguing suggestion philarchive.org/rec/YADTPO-2

To illustrate, contrast the case of being a Christian, where you really hold certain beliefs and live your life by them The thought is that when a philosopher decides to defend a certain position about free will or metaethics or whatever, they are *not* doing that same thing

Many of you will know the famous finding from @existwell.bsky.social and Derek Anderson: Philosophers' views on philosophical questions are not predicted by their personality traits But why not? I asked Anderson about this, and he had a very intriguing suggestion philarchive.org/rec/YADTPO-2

"Are you happy?" New research on two ways to understand this question: - as a question about how you feel right now, in this moment - as a question about the overall state of your life These two understandings turn out to be radically different www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sociologist @l-sage.bsky.social on why sociology papers so often fail to replicate Key insight: Non-sociologists sometimes put the blame on people doing autoethnographies or something like… but by definition, the work that fails to replicate is never that kind of sociology! 1/3

The sociology research that fails to replicate is scientific quantitative research If we think in terms of opposing camps within sociology, this is the part that people doing more “critical” or qualitative work are usually not too fond of 2/3