Flickers of Freedom

Experiment Month is Back!

 

Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th.

The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the plan for your experiment to Experiment Month. Then, if your submission is accepted, the staff will help you out with the more technical side of running the study. More specifically:

• If you think it might be helpful, staff members will connect you with an 'experiment buddy' who will help you out with experimental design. 
• Once the design is complete, the staff will run your experiment online and send you the data.
• Finally, staff members will help you with the statistics needed to analyze your data and see whether your hypothesis was confirmed.

To get a better sense of how this project has gone in the past, check out this summary of what ended up happening for the philosophers who submitted last year.

Free Will and Emotion

Just wanted to put up a quick note about an exciting new study on the relationship between people's emotions and their intuitions about free will.

It has often been suggested that people's belief in free will is affected in some way by their emotions. (For example, it might be that people are drawn to believe in free will because they are angered by certain wrong-doers and therefore motivated to believe that these wrong-doers are blameworthy.) Florian Cova and colleagues set out to test this hypothesis using a surprising new method. They found participants who suffered from a blunting in emotional response due to frontotemporal dementia and then checked to see how those participants thought about free will. The results were quite surprising...

Crowd-sourcing my SPA Remarks

At the annual International Free Will Conference (you know, the Pacific APA), the Society for the Philosophy of Agency is having its inaugural meeting. There’s going to be a panel discussion on the State of the Field, and I’m tasked with talking about free will. Among the things I’m supposed to be ready to talk about are the current central issues in debates about free will, interesting developments, and emerging topics over the next 5+ years.

For the talk, I thought about consulting my intuitions on the matters. However, I’ve been told that my intuitions are generally defective. So, I thought I should do some Serious Experimental work and just ask you, dear blog reader, what you think about these matters. I can’t promise that I will use your remarks in my talk, but I can’t promise that I won’t. I can promise that I won't run a regression analysis on the frequency of various remarks.

So I bleg of you: what do you think is Big Time in free will, what’s new and exciting to you, and what do you think will be Big Time in 5+ years? 

Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy

Oxford University Press has started up the new series Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Each volume will consist of a series of new papers in the field of experimental philosophy. 

The Call for Abstracts for the first volume is now available. So if you are interested in contributing, all you need to do is send in a brief (less than 1,000 word) abstract by Dec. 15. Papers can present new experimental findings or examine the philosophical implications of existing studies. Criticisms of experimental philosophy are always welcome. 

Existing research in experimental philosophy has often focused on questions about free will (see this quick bibliography), and it would be great to have some submissions from Flickerers in this new volume! 

Nahmias and Murray on Bypassing

One of my favorite recent discoveries in the free will literature is Nahmias and Murray's series of studies on what they call 'bypassing,' and I wanted to see whether people might have some ideas about how to explain their results. 

To give just one example, in one of their elegant experiments, participants were given a description of a universe ('Universe A') in which everything that happens is completely caused by something that happened earlier. Participants were then asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements:

In Universe A, what a person believes has no effect on what they end up being caused to do.

In Universe A, what a person wants has no effect on what they end up being caused to do.

In Universe A, a person’s decisions have no effect on what they end up being caused to do.

Surprisingly enough, participants tended to agree with these statements. This is a very puzzling response. If everything in the universe is caused by something that happened before, it seems that people's actions could easily be caused by their beliefs, desires and decisions. But people seem to reject that view. Why might they be doing this?

The question will surely be a controversial one, but my hunch is that the Nahmias and Murray experiments are showing us something deep and important about how people understand human action. For example, it might be that people see a fundamental distinction between being caused to do something and choosing to do it on the basis of reasons. Then, if they hear that a behavior was completely caused, they immediately conclude that it could not have been the result of a decision based on beliefs and desires.

Experiment Month has Begun

Just writing to let people know that the Experiment Month project is now underway. 

The project hosts 17 different experimental philosophy studies designed by 29 philosophers, each working on illuminating a different philosophical question. 

So please take a moment to help these philosophers out, either by stopping by the Experiment Month website to fill out a brief questionnaire or by spreading the word about these new studies. 

(The experiment month initiative is run by Yale Cognitive Science with a grant from the American Philosophical Association.)

The Character Project

The Character Project at Wake Forest University is very excited to launch its funding competition entitled "New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Character." This $300,000 RFP is aimed at work in philosophy on the topic of character, and proposals can request between $40,000 and $100,000 for projects not to exceed one year in duration. We hope to make between 5-6 awards. A residential incentive of $6,000 for one semester or $12,000 for an academic year will be offered to philosophy RFP winners who are willing to move to Wake Forest University during the award period, and this stipend would not count as part of the research funding request. A willingness to move will not be taken into account when evaluating proposals.

Since work here will primarily be theoretical, the funding is aimed at semester or yearlong sabbatical research leave projects involving a book manuscript or series of substantive articles on character.

This competition is supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

For more details, please visit www.thecharacterproject.com

Experimental Philosophy of Free Will Boot Camp

Just a quick note to let people know about the upcoming Experimental Philosophy of Free Will Boot Camp. The boot camp is designed to help philosophers get the skills they need to do cutting-edge work in experimental philosophy. So social psychologist David Pizarro will be providing hands-on training in experimental design and statistics, and attendees will have an opportunity (purely optional) to present their own ideas for possible projects and get feedback from the group as a whole.

Applications are due May 4.

[A big thank you to Al Mele whose Big Questions in Free Will project made this whole event possible!]

Latest issue of Science features... experimental philosophy of free will

Shaun Nichols reports. 

What Counts as Evidence for the Meaning of Free Will?

In the comments to Eddy's post on the free will of dogs (which I found troubling since it means that my new dog Charlie on occasion freely chooses to eat the feces of the other dogs), Alan made the following very interesting remark: 

What we mean by [free will] can change, but only by means of evidence, not ad populum fallacy. The thorny thing is agreeing on what matters as evidence, and in some ways the incompatibilism/compatibilism debate seems actually to get in the way of assessing what counts as evidence here.

I asked Alan what he thought should count as evidence for the meaning of free will and he responded in the comments.  Now I'd like to throw out this question to the rest of the Flickerers. (I miss the word "Gardeners").  What counts as evidence for a change in the meaning of free will, and does the incompatibilist/compatibilist debate get in the way of determining it?  If so, how?

(Manuel might have some views on this, I imagine...)