Experimental Philosophy

Are Lying and Perjury Dual Character Concepts? - Law and Philosophy To commit perjury, you have to say something you believe to be false, not merely suggest it. The paper presents a novel explanation for the divergence between the folk and the legal concept of lying, ...

Paper available open access at:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Key insight:

The legal concept is not some completely distinct thing that you would have to learn separately

Instead, the ordinary concept comes with two different criteria. To learn the legal concept, you have to know *which* of those criteria to use in legal contexts

New experimental jurisprudence paper from Iza Skoczen on the legal concept PERJURY vs. the ordinary concept LYING

This paper introduces a surprising new view about the relationship between legal concepts and ordinary concepts

@izaskoczen.bsky.social

x.com/izaskoczen/s...

Does going to college make people more liberal? Probably yes, but it’s complicated… For decades, US adults with degrees have held more left-leaning views on social issues, but not on economic ones. And, until the 2010s, grads did not *identify* as more liberal than non-grads.

Flanagan & de Almeida on Cognitive Science and the Hart-Dworkin Debate Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) - Faculty of Law) & Guilherme F. C. F. de Almeida (Yale University) have posted What Cognitive Science says about the Hart-Dworkin Debate on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Hard cases generate disputes in which judges insist that fidelity to law sometimes requires departing from its letter. Ronald Dworkin argued that this phenomenon poses a distinctive challenge to legal positivism.

Flanagan & de Almeida on Cognitive Science and the Hart-Dworkin Debate

Brian Flanagan (National University of Ireland, Maynooth (NUI Maynooth) - Faculty of Law) & Guilherme F. C. F. de Almeida (Yale University) have posted What Cognitive Science says about the Hart-Dworkin Debate on SSRN. Here is…

I am talking about experimental philosophy of medicine on Thursday. ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom.us/j/67803558818

New paper from the IMC lab! I am very excited about this one. For years, I have been arguing that one of the main claims of the so-called "simulation heuristic" is likely not true for episodic counterfactual thinking, namely that the harder it is to mentally simulate it, the less plausible (1/n)

That’s fair. I was assuming that, e.g., the way people behave on Bluesky is affected by how they see other people behaving on Bluesky - and then that we need research to understand how and why this happens

But you might potentially question that whole premise

An earlier meta-analysis that gets a similar result:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.3...

If we actually put someone in a community where 80% of people do something, that fact would deeply influence their behavior

The theoretical question is, why don’t we get that effect from interventions where we just inform someone “80% of people in your community do this”?

A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of social norms messaging approaches for improving health behaviours in developed countries - Nature Human Behaviour Social norms approaches are widely applied in health promotion. This pre-registered systematic review and meta-analysis of RCTs using social norms messaging in developed countries aimed to evaluate th...

Meta-analysis: After correcting for publication bias, there is no effect of “social norm messaging” nudges on health behavior

We need theories that explain *why* these interventions don’t work

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why?

To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

1/11

Woah! It’s so interesting to see all of this confirmation from a completely different source. Since your paper is not primarily about what is going on in these specific cases, I totally didn’t think about the significance your results have for these cases in particular

Exploring the evolutionary roots of theory of mind: Primate errors on false belief tasks reveal representational limits Human adults flexibly reason about others' unobservable mental states, a capacity known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Unfortunately, the roots of this capa…

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks.

A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge.

Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Could you say a little more regarding this point about the Socratic Questionnaires paper? What was the qualitative evidence you got, and how would it be explained by truth/truthfulness entanglement?

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true”

Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness”

philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

@xphilosopher.bsky.social and I tried to study what beliefs do (or at least, what people think they do).

Across hundreds of participant generated beliefs and first/third party ratings, we found they express identity and/or represent facts, in the pattern described in this post.

1/

Non-paywalled version:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

We find a two-factor solution:

Beliefs vary in whether in:
(a) whether they are aimed at tracking facts in the world
(b) whether they are aimed at expressing your identity

Strikingly, these can vary independently! A single belief can be very high in both

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- Would you describe the belief by saying “I think…” vs. “I believe…”?
- Does having this belief relate to your membership in a social group?

… and many others

The key question was whether we can identify certain deeper factors underlying all these dimensions

2/

In this new paper, we look at some different dimensions on which beliefs vary:

- Is the belief deeply important to your identity?
- Would you change your mind if you got evidence against it?
- Is it best described in terms of credences (“pretty sure”), or is it more yes/no?

1/

Congratulations Justin!!

Thanks for continuing the conversation

Their example is: "Professors teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Adjunct instructors teach on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."

Their point is that this generic could be true even if it only holds in one specific department at one university

Thanks for your engagement!

Their example is: "Professors teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Adjunct instructors teach on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."

Perhaps my example sounds more normative than theirs? In any case, their key point is that it only holds in a contextually restricted domain

You might disagree with their theory, and if so, I’d love to hear your thoughts

Their theory is that there is quantifier domain restriction on generics. A generic can hold for all situations within a contextually specified domain, even if it doesn’t hold outside that domain

Core idea:

A generic about X doesn’t have to say anything general about the nature of X. It can say something that holds only in one specific context

But even then, it has to say something that is *stable*. Something that isn’t just a coincidence about how things happened to turn out

“Children enter from the door on the left.”

This sentence is what’s called a GENERIC… but it isn’t saying anything general about the nature of children. What then makes it generic?

New theory from @kateritch.bsky.social and Ny Vasil

philpapers.org/archive/RITG...

New experimental paper on intuitions about whether people have obligations *to themselves*

From philosopher Laura Soter (@laurasoter.bsky.social) in JPSP

psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

This is a fascinating new experimental jurisprudence paper from Chris Jaeger on what is "reasonable."

For laypeople's judgments of reasonableness, the probability of harm (P) has an important effect beyond its role in the B<PL formula.

yalelawjournal.org/article/the-...

The new journal *Experimental Philosophy* is now open for submissions! Very glad to serve as an AE and looking forward to seeing this take off. #philsky