Campaign residen the P -litics - Princeton University

Professor Sarah-Jane Leslie *07
really were terrorists. What prejudice did that spawn? How
do we understand and combat it?”
Joshua Knobe’s best-known contribution to experimental
philosophy also is related to issues of blame, going back to a
survey he conducted in New York City’s Washington Square
Park. It was a question of intentionality, based on the following
scenario: A proposed new product will increase profits,
but at the cost of harming the environment. Declaring that
he cares about money and not the environment, the head of
a company gives the go-ahead to make the product. As
expected, profits rise, as does environmental damage. So
Knobe asked survey respondents if the executive was to
blame for harm to the environment, and 82 percent said yes.
Now imagine the same scenario, with one key difference:
The new product helps rather than hurts the environment.
The executive still cares just about profits, so the new product
goes forward and the money rolls in. But when asked if
the executive had helped the environment, only 23 percent
of Knobe’s respondents gave him credit for that.
Thus was born the “Knobe effect,” which summarizes that
people are moralizing creatures who are far more likely to
assign blame for bad things than credit for good things.
Knobe has done further research delving into questions of
free will, determinism, and the philosophical processes that
are involved in triggering emotional versus rational responses
when it comes to passing judgment.
The Knobe effect, which he uncovered while still a graduate
student at Princeton, frequently is referenced in election
years to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.
It also made Knobe a star and one of experimental
philosophy’s most visible figures. He is writing a book about
experimental philosophy that he hopes will evoke the image
of an armchair going up in flames.
Not everyone is convinced. “If you had put this to philoso-
phers before the advent of experimental philosophy, you
would have seen this same contrast,” Gideon Rosen says.
“Sure, you can go out and do surveys to confirm it. But those
intuitions are interesting and available without doing surveys.
Even if Knobe had never done an experiment in his
life, he could have written a paper about this with the same
significance. My hunch is that philosophers are good at
channeling the judgments ordinary people would make.”
Maybe, maybe not. Anthony Appiah, who was one of
Knobe’s dissertation readers at Princeton, thinks that such
surveys can only enhance the process of philosophy.
“The question isn’t if you could come to the same conclusion
without experiments,” says Appiah, “but do the experiments
move us ahead in different ways or faster than sitting
around reflecting? I think it would be hard to argue this
hasn’t helped stimulate new questions. The test will be 10
years from now, what we’ve learned by then.”
Another common attack on
experimental philosophy is that because most experiments
involve asking the opinions of people not trained in philosophical
thinking, the results are not valid. It’s “folk philosophy,”
what ordinary people think of as philosophy, rather
than the real thing.
“[In] some of these surveys, it’s unclear why the results are
relevant to philosophy,” Rosen says. “So why jump through
hoops? Why not just discuss substantive questions of right
and wrong with people who have been trained to think
about hard cases?” Nonsense, says Stich.
“The whole ‘expertise defense’ [of armchair philosophy] says
it doesn’t matter what the man on the street thinks about
intuitive knowledge, moral permissibility, or intentionality,
because he’s not an expert,” Stich says. “Philosophers claim to
be the only experts capable of producing philosophical intuitions.
But are they? Do you have to have six years of graduate
training at a prestige university to be philosophically savvy?”
In recent years, Stich has been doing survey experiments
to see if philosophers have systematically different intuitions
from ordinary people (which conceivably would render professional
philosophers’ judgments less universal than the
discipline claims). Early indications are that they do, Stich
says. But while those philosophers’ “right” intuitions might
win over similarly minded peers on a tenure committee,
does that give them the weight of inherent truth? Experi -
mental philosophy amounts to a generation saying, not so
fast. Ultimately, the debate seems to come down to who
owns philosophy and even truth — a closed society of
experts, or everyone?
“Truth does not belong to philosophy but to all of us,” says
Appiah. “How ordinary people use it is part of the accounting,
even if they’re deploying it in ways that may be slippery
and incoherent. Language and the mind are both messy, and
so is the world.
“Reality,” Appiah says, “is never tidy.” π
David Menconi is a music critic and feature writer at the News
& Observer in Raleigh, N.C.
paw.princeton.edu • May 16, 2012 Princeton Alumni Weekly
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