Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much of the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. Dr. Knobe argues that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Knobe, J. M., Nichols, S., & MyiLibrary. (2008). Experimental philosophy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63(3), 190-194. doi:10.1093/analys/63.3.190. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2010). Person as scientist, person as moralist. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4), 315-329. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000907. [Link]
Knobe, J. (2010). Action trees and moral judgment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(3), 555-578. doi:10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01093.x. [Link]
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