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Do philosophical intuitions vary across demographic groups? Knobe v. Machery & Stich

Brian Leiter

It's the battle of the X-Phil titans!   Joshua Knobe (Yale) recently argued that the experimental results show little variation in philosophical intuitions among different demographic groups, while Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Stephen Stich (Rutgers) contest Knobe's interpretation of the data:  you can read their draft paper here:  Download Reply to Knobe — Demographic Difference in Philosophical Intuition – 11-3-2019; and you can look at the data regarding different X-Phil studies here:   Download Copy of TABLE 1 – Knobe Reply – Spreadsheet – 10-14-2019.  I'm hardly an expert, although on my read Machery & Stich are closer to the truth here.  What do readers think?  (Thanks to Stephen Stich for flagging this debate and sharing the papers and data.)

UPDATE:   Professor Knobe has kindly shared his lengthier reply to Professors Machery and Stich.

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9 responses to “Do philosophical intuitions vary across demographic groups? Knobe v. Machery & Stich”

  1. John Fischer

    There is a similar disagreement among leader proponents of X-phi about what the "folk" think about free will/moral responsibility, e.g., its relationship to causal determinism. Reputable and careful practitioners of this methodology come to contradictory results. It is pretty clear that how one frames the question tilts the answers. So even before the stage of analysis of the data, there are perhaps subtle ways in which the framing of the question(s) have a significant impact on the results. This implies, for me at least, that I don't/won't put much weight on putative views of the folk, as gleaned from questionnaires, at least until the results are shown to be resilient. Even then, it is not clear what the probative value of such "results" is.

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  2. John Fischer

    Should be "leading" proponents–sorry.

    Reply
  3. Roger Albin

    There is a set of formal statistical tools, meta-analysis, that might be useful. These are widely used in the medical literature to aggregate studies. Even when meta-analysis doesn't produce clear answers, which is often, its useful in assessing individual study quality and identifying major gaps in the literature.

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  4. Mike Valdman

    I'm more interested in whether interpretations of the data vary across demographic groups.

    Reply
  5. Jan Sprenger

    @Roger Albin: In fact, there IS a meta-analysis for experiments/surveys on the intuitions on the reference of proper names (Gödel/Jonah)! The authors are my PhD student Noah van Dongen, Matteo Colombo, Felipe Romero and myself. This concerns, of course, just a very restricted subset of the general debate between Machery & Stich and Knobe. Still, you (and others) may find it useful.

    https://psyarxiv.com/ez96q/

    Disclaimer: we do not have any stakes in the debate.
    Note: we did not include a separate meta-analysis of the Jonah cases due to low sample size, but we can make it available if there is interest. The general picture does not change.

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  6. Roger Albin

    Thanks – looks solid. I'm not a philosopher, so I don't have a stake in the debate. I'm not surprised by the results.

    Reply
  7. Thomas Mulligan

    Although empirical research on distributive justice is not typically done by philosophers (rather: experimental economists, social psychologists, and others), it seems relevant here. This literature is fascinating, not least because it suggests consensus, not variation, in judgments about justice. This consensus is robust to race, gender, class, and nationality. Deep down, we share a sense that justice is a matter of giving people what they deserve. Explanations for our innate sense of desert-based justice are sought in evolutionary psychology (see, especially, Michael Bang Petersen's work) and neuroscience (e.g. Cappelen et al.'s "Equity Theory and Fair Inequality: A Neuroeconomic Study").

    A word of caution: These experiments–whether they concern justice or not–invariably implicate many philosophical concepts. Not only can it be hard to prize apart desert (or whatever) from need, utility, dollar-valued surplus, maximin, etc., it can be hard to distinguish particular conceptions of desert (as based in contribution, merit, or effort) from each other. When it comes to interpretation, care is called for.

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  8. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    I am surprised by John's comments (hi, John!). Here is how we and Ravizza characterized their project:

    "We begin by saying that we shall be trying to articulate the inchoate, shared views about moral responsibility
    in (roughly speaking) a modern, Western democratic society. We suppose that there is enough
    agreement about these matters – at some level of reflection – to justify engaging in the attempt to
    bring out and systematize these shared views. Our method will then be similar to the Rawlsian
    method of seeking a “reflective equilibrium” in the relevant domain. Here we shall be identifying and
    evaluating “considered judgments” about particular cases‐ actual and hypothetical – in which an
    agent’s moral responsibility is at issue" (1998, 10-11).

    As experimental philosophers have been at pains to show for the better part of 15 years, this claim about philosophical methodology is pretty common in the literature on free will, ethics, and elsewhere. Now, because experimental philosophers have found different results using different stimuli and measures, John calls the whole enterprise into question–even going so far as to place "results" in scare quotes.

    What are we to make of this? Does the move being made here amount to an admission that the aforementioned "shared view" project is no longer viable? Is the claim instead that the project is still legitimate but that the methods of experimental philosophy are insufficient to the task? If the latter claim is what John (and others) have in mind, then what methods would suffice? For if the aforementioned project is to be workable, surely *some* method will have to do the trick. It would be odd if the tools of cognitive and social psychology are of no absolutely of no help when it comes to the contours of common sense. But if they are then what? Is armchair reflection the only method left here? If so, why doesn't the fact that philosophers themselves disagree based on subtle differences in the way thought experiments are worded throw this practice into doubt as well?

    In short, I think that John–and others who take his line of reasoning–owe us a bit more byway of explanation when it comes to what we should do in light of the problem at hand (that is, conflicting data, cross cultural differences, etc). Unless and until philosophers who appeal to to shared views, common sense, ordinary intuitions, what most people think, etc. abandon their enterprise, dismissing the very kind of evidence they need to motivate their views seems misguided and self-undermining. It would make much more sense for philosophers with these meta-philosophical commitments to roll up their sleeves and help experimental philosophers get at the data their views require. If they don't think any of the results we have found thus far shed any philosophical light, what do they suggest we do to better elucidate the very judgments they claim to be trying to systematize?

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  9. Joshua Knobe

    Hi John,

    Thanks so much for writing in about this. You are completely right to say that there is a certain amount of disagreement between different experimental philosophers about folk intuitions concerning free will, but I thought it might be helpful to say a little more just to clarify the nature of that disagreement.

    Existing research finds that people give seemingly compatibilist responses in some cases and seemingly incompatibilist responses in others. These findings have led many researchers to think that certain psychological processes draw people toward compatibilism while others draw them toward incompatibilism.

    With this in the background, it is easy to explain the nature of the disagreement. Experimental philosophers overwhelmingly agree with each other about the actual patterns of people's intuitions (when people will give seemingly compatibilist responses, when they will give seemingly incompatibilist responses, etc.). The debate is just between different views about the deeper explanation of those patterns.

    So, for example, Eddy Nahmias and I have very different views about how people ordinarily understand free will. However, the debate is not all about which intuition people tend to have about any individual case. It is entirely a debate about how to explain these intuitions, with the two of us offering radically different views about the psychological processes within people's minds that lead them to have the intuitions they do.

    In short, I completely understand what you mean when you say that "Reputable and careful practitioners of this methodology come to contradictory results," but I would be inclined to frame things in a slightly different way. For example, I would not say that Nahmias and I have come to contradictory results, or even that we have any disagreement at all about the results. In my view, the results he and his collaborators report about patterns in people's intuitions are all rock solid, and I bet he would say the same about the results obtained by Shaun Nichols, Thomas Nadelhoffer, David Rose and others. The disagreement is simply about how to explain all of these results within a deeper theoretical framework.

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