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Summary

Experimental philosophy is an exciting and controversial approach to philosophy, calling on empirical methods to cast light on philosophical issues. Empirical methods have been brought to bear on a wide range of topics in philosophy, including a number of topics in philosophy of language. Most central amongst these is work considering theories of reference.  

Key works The central work in experimental philosophy of reference is Machery et al 2004. See also their follow-up in Mallon et al 2009, and a number of important responses (including Deutsch 2009, Devitt 2010, Sytsma & Livengood 2011). Important work has been done on other topics in philosophy of language as well, including the work by Pietroski et al 2009, Phelan 2010, Leslie et al 2011, and Genone & Lombrozo 2012, amongst others.
Introductions Genone 2012; see also the chapters by Machery and Martí in Machery & O'Neill 2014.
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  1. Arne Næss’s experiments in truth.Jamin Asay - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):545-566.
    Well over half a century before the development of contemporary experimental philosophy, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss conducted a number of empirical investigations intended to document non-philosophers’ convictions regarding a number of topics of philosophical interest. In the 1930s and 1950s, Næss collected data relevant to non-philosophers’ conceptions of truth. This research attracted the attention of Alfred Tarski at the time, and has recently been re-evaluated by Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski. In this paper I return to Næss’s research on (...)
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  2. True Beauty.Ryan P. Doran - forthcoming - British Journal of Aesthetics.
    What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...)
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  3. Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora.Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter, Lucien Baumgartner & Pascale Willemsen - 2024 - Language and Cognition.
    Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...)
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  4. Tracing Truth Through Conceptual Scaling: Mapping People’s Understanding of Abstract Concepts.Lukas S. Huber, David-Elias Künstle & Kevin Reuter - manuscript
    Traditionally, the investigation of truth has been anchored in a priori reasoning. Cognitive science deviates from this tradition by adding empirical data on how people understand and use concepts. Building on psychophysics and machine learning methods, we introduce conceptual scaling, an approach to map people's understanding of abstract concepts. This approach, allows computing participant-specific conceptual maps from obtained ordinal comparison data, thereby quantifying perceived similarities among abstract concepts. Using this approach, we investigated individual's alignment with philosophical theories on truth and (...)
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  5. People’s Beliefs About Pronouns Reflect Both the Language They Speak and Their Ideologies.April Bailey, Robin Dembroff, Daniel Wodak, Elif Ikizer & Andrei Cimpian - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
    Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...)
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  6. Experimenting with Truth.Jamin Asay - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
    In the last decade Robert Barnard and Joseph Ulatowski have conducted a number of experimental studies in order to better understand the ordinary notion of truth. In this paper I critically engage their ecological approach to the study of truth, and argue for a wider perspective on how truth should be empirically studied: in addition to the experimental data that they emphasize and collect, there should also be a substantial observational element to conceptual ecology. I then critically evaluate the conclusions (...)
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  7. Experimental Philosophy of Language: Proper Names and Predicates.Edouard Machery - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. De Gruyter. pp. 183-210.
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  8. What does it take to tell a lie?Emanuel Viebahn - forthcoming - In Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 1-24.
    Lying requires asserting a disbelieved proposition, that much is widely accepted in the debate on how to define lying. But what else is required? Does lying require a particular linguistic manner of expression, such as saying? Does the proposition asserted have to be false (and not merely disbelieved)? And does lying require an intention to deceive? The aim of this chapter is to provide an opinionated introduction to the debates on these questions that takes into account both theoretical considerations and (...)
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  9. Cross‐cultural variation and perspectivalism: Alignment of two red herrings?Jincai Li - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (4):1157-1163.
    In this brief reply I respond to criticisms of my book, The referential mechanism of proper names, from Michael Devitt and Nicolo D'Agruma. I focus on the question of whether the perspectivism advocated in the book explains the empirical results there detailed.
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  10. Conceptual Revision in Action.Ethan Landes & Kevin Reuter - manuscript
    Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people's (...)
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  11. Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation.Emanuel Viebahn, Alex Wiegmann, Neele Engelmann & Pascale Willemsen - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (7).
    In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed-false presupposition the speaker intends to convey. These judgements are robust and remain so when the participants are given the possibility of classifying the utterances as misleading or as deceiving. (...)
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  12. A bibliometric study of the research field of experimental philosophy of language.Jincai Li & Xiaozhen Zhu - 2022 - Forum for Linguistic Studies 4 (1):18-35.
    The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard Machery, John (...)
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  13. The origin of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions: Perspective taking in the Gödel case.Jincai Li - 2021 - Journal of Semantics 38 (3).
    In this paper, we aim to trace the origin of the systematic cross-cultural variations in referential intuitions by investigating the effects of perspective taking on people’s responses in the Gödel-style probes through two novel experiments. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2, we first briefly introduce the MMNS (2004) study, and then critically review the two relevant studies conducted by Sytsma and colleagues (i.e., Sytsma and Livengood 2011; Sytsma et al. 2015). In section 3, we introduce the literature (...)
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  14. In defence of the villain: Edwards on deflationism and pluralism.Jeremy Wyatt - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (8):1513-1537.
    In The Metaphysics of Truth, Doug Edwards offers a sustained case against deflationism about truth and in favour of his preferred pluralist theory of truth. Here, I take up three of the main components of that case. The first is Edwards' account of the distinctive metaphysical commitments of deflationism. His views about this issue have changed over the past few years, and I detail these changes as well as a concern for the views that he develops in the book. Second, (...)
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  15. The meaning of ‘reasonable’: Evidence from a corpus-linguistic study.Lucien Baumgartner & Markus Kneer - forthcoming - In Kevin P. Tobia (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. Cambridge University Press.
    The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...)
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  16. Lying with deceptive implicatures? Solving a puzzle about conflicting results.Alex Wiegmann - 2023 - Analysis 83 (1):107-118.
    Does lying require a speaker to explicitly express something (she believes to be) false, or is it also possible to lie with deceptive implicatures? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of any philosophical definition of lying, several studies have addressed this question empirically in recent years. Their findings, however, seem to be in conflict. This paper reports an experiment with 222 participants that investigates the hypothesis that these conflicting results are due to variation regarding whether or not (...)
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  17. Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers.Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann, Olga P. Marchenko & Irina Schumski - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):735-762.
    The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to _say_ something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies (...)
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  18. Category mistakes electrified.Poppy Mankowitz - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-21.
    Occurrences of sentences that are traditionally considered category mistakes, such as 'The red number is divisible by three', tend to elicit a sense of oddness in assessors. In attempting to explain this oddness, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. It might be thought that recent work in experimental psycholinguistics—in particular, the recording of event-related brain potentials (patterns of voltage variation (...)
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  19. Linguistic Corpora and Ordinary Language: On the Dispute Between Ryle and Austin About the Use of ‘Voluntary’, ‘Involuntary’, ‘Voluntarily’, and ‘Involuntarily’.Michael Zahorec, Robert Bishop, Nat Hansen, John Schwenkler & Justin Sytsma - 2022 - In David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Springer Verlag. pp. 121-149.
    The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...)
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  20. A Bibliometric Analysis of Experimental Philosophy of Language.Javier Osorio-Mancilla - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Springer Verlag. pp. 13-29.
    Since the implementation of experimental methods in philosophy, several philosophical disciplines are producing a fruitful body of research that has recently gained more recognition. Experimental Philosophy of Language (EPL) is one of the research topics that has drawn a great deal of attention lately. This chapter performs a bibliometric analysis of the EPL field in order to show the research trends, collaboration networks and topics structure that can be found in the literature. Techniques such as citation analysis, co-word occurrence analysis (...)
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  21. Distributional Theories of Meaning: Experimental Philosophy of Language.Jumbly Grindrod - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Springer Verlag. pp. 75-99.
    Distributional semantics is an area of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics that seeks to model the meanings of words by producing a semantic space that captures the distributional properties of those words within a corpus. In this paper, I provide an overview of distributional semantic models, including a broad sketch of how such models are constructed. I then outline the reasons for and against the claim that distributional semantic models can serve as a theory of meaning, paying special attention to (...)
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  22. Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Springer Verlag. pp. 31-56.
    This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophyordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. (...)
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  23. Introduction: 20 Years of Experimental Philosophy of Language.David Bordonaba-Plou - 2023 - In Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Springer Verlag. pp. 1-10.
    Experimental philosophy of language, as a subdiscipline of experimental philosophy, shares its most important defining characteristic: conducting empirical studies to solve traditional problems in the philosophy of language. Much of the attention in the field has been directed to theories of reference because of the influential 2004 article by Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. After almost 20 years of research, it is time to take stock. This introduction has two goals. First, to represent (...)
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  24. Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects.David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.) - 2023 - Springer Verlag.
    This book presents the current state of experimental philosophy of language, drawing attention to corpus methods. The volume highlights new trends in experimental philosophy of language, thus exploring the future’s discipline. It includes cross-linguistics studies that reveal the differences and similarities in how speakers of different languages use specific terms, and scrutinizes methodological advances used in experimental philosophy of language. The book also includes politically engaged experimental philosophy of language studies focusing on slurs, pejoratives, and hate speech. The topic’s interdisciplinary (...)
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  25. Possible worlds truth table task.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen, Peter Collins & Karl Christoph Klauer - 2023 - Cognition 238 (105507):1-24.
    In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by an alternative (...)
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  26. X-Phi and the challenge from ad hoc concepts.Michelle Liu - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-25.
    Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.
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  27. Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-34.
    Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...)
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  28. Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations.Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld & Guillermo Del Pinal - 2023 - Proceedings of the 45Th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45:1-6.
    Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...)
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  29. An empirical perspective on pictorial lies.Emanuel Viebahn & Alex Wiegmann - manuscript
    Theorists in the debate on how to define lying disagree whether it is possible to lie with pictures. At the same time, they agree that definitions of lying should be consistent with how laypersons use the term ‘lie’. This calls for an empirical perspective on whether ordinary usage allows for pictorial lies. The present paper provides some initial data on this question by reporting an experiment with 623 participants investigating layperson judgements about cases of insincere linguistic and pictorial communication. The (...)
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  30. The polarity effect of evaluative language.Lucien Baumgartner, Pascale Https://Orcidorg Willemsen & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology.
    Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...)
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  31. The dilemma of analytic philosophy in Chinese.Yuanfan Huang - 2022 - Philosophical Forum 53 (3):175-186.
    Although a sizable number of works on analytic philosophy are published in non-Western languages, the literature continues to be written mainly in Western languages, especially English and German. This article makes a case for discussing analytic philosophy in Chinese and argues that it entails a dilemma: it can fulfill either the audience-service or knowledge-service functions but not both at the same time. This is problematic because a standard original or critical philosophical article should fulfill both functions. Then, to challenge the (...)
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  32. Clause-internal coherence as presupposition resolution.Kelsey Sasaki & Daniel Altshuler - forthcoming - Proceedings of Amsterdam Colloquium 2022.
    Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC (...)
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  33. Zombie intuitions.Eugen Fischer & Justin Sytsma - 2021 - Cognition 215 (C):104807.
    In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...)
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  34. Exploring Metaphor’s Communicative Effects in Reasoning on Vaccination.Francesca Ervas, Pietro Salis, Cristina Sechi & Rachele Fanari - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13 (1027733.):1-15.
    Introduction: The paper investigates the impact of the use of metaphors in reasoning tasks concerning vaccination, especially for defeasible reasoning cases. We assumed that both metaphor and defeasible reasoning can be relevant to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon, by anticipating possible defeating conditions. -/- Methods: We hypothesized that extended metaphor could improve both the argumentative and the communicative effects of the message. We designed an empirical study to test our main hypotheses: participants (N = 196, (...)
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  35. Lying, Deceptive Implicatures, and Commitment.Alex Wiegmann, Pascale Willemsen & Jörg Meibauer - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8.
    Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...)
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  36. The referential mechanism of proper names: cross-cultural investigations into referential intuitions.Jincai Li - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li's book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the (...)
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  37. Against intentionalism: an experimental study on demonstrative reference.Wojciech Rostworowski, Katarzyna Kuś & Bartosz Maćkiewicz - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (5):1027-1061.
    In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...)
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  38. Intuitions on Semantic Reference.Massimiliano Vignolo & Filippo Domaneschi - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):755-778.
    Since Machery et al. _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12 ( 2004 ) attacked Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism, their experiment has been repeated several times, in its original version or in some revised ones, by theorists with contrasting intents. Some repeated the experiment for confirming its results, others for proving them unreliable. One striking characteristic of those surveys is that they mostly replicated the data collected in Machery et al.’s _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12, 2004 experiment: less than 60% of Westerners showed preference for (...)
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  39. Truth-conditional variability of color ascriptions: empirical results concerning the polysemy hypothesis.Adrian Ziółkowski & Tomasz Zyglewicz - forthcoming - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Recent experimental work has shown that the truth-value judgments of color predications, i.e. utterances of the form “the leaves on my tree are green” or “these walls are brown,” are influenced by slight changes in the context of utterance (Hansen and Chemla 2013, Ziółkowski, 2021). Most explanations of this phenomenon focus on the semantics of color adjectives. However, it is not clear if these explanations do justice to the nuances of the empirical data on context-sensitivity of color predications (Ziółkowski, 2021). (...)
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  40. Reactionary attitudes: Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter Movement.Anastasia Chan, Marinus Ferreira & Mark Alfano - forthcoming - In Fernando Aguiar-Gonzalez & Antonio Gaitan (eds.), Experimental Methods in Moral Philosophy. Routledge.
    On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The scale of these protests, both online and in (...)
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  41. Foundational Issues in Conceptual Engineering: Introduction and Overview.Isaac Manuel Gustavo & Koch Steffen - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-9.
    This is the introduction to the Special Issue ‘Foundational Issues in Conceptual Engineering’. The issue contains contributions by James Andow, Delia Belleri, David Chalmers, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Eugen Fischer, Viktoria Knoll, Edouard Machery and Amie Thomasson. We, the editors, provide a brief introduction to the main topics of the issue and then summarize its contributions.
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  42. ‘Must’ implies ‘can’.Miklós Kürthy, Fabio Del Prete & Luca Barlassina - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (3):620-643.
    An open question in the semantics of modality is what relations there are among different modal flavours. In this article, we consider the thorny issue of whether ascribing to an agent the obligation to φ implies that it is possible for the agent to φ. Traditionally, this issue has been interpreted as whether ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. But another linguistic interpretation is available as well, namely, whether ‘must’ implies ‘can’ (MIC). We show that ‘must’ does imply ‘can’ via a convergent argument. (...)
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  43. Psychophysiological approach to the Liar paradox: Jean Buridan’s virtual entailment principle put to the test.Konrad Rudnicki & Piotr Łukowski - 2019 - Synthese 198 (S22):5573-5592.
    This article presents an empirical examination of the consequences of the virtual entailment principle proposed by Jean Buridan to resolve the Liar paradox. This principle states that every sentence in natural language implicitly asserts its own truth. Adopting this principle means that the Liar sentence is not paradoxical but false, because its content is contradictory to what is virtually implied. As a result, humans should perceive the Liar sentence the same way as any other false sentence. This solution to the (...)
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  44. Da prece como poder mágico-religioso entre Eliade e Mauss à oração como poder escatológico-existencial entre Bultmann e Tillich.Luiz Carlos Mariano da Rosa - 2019 - Sacrilegens 16 (2):204-231.
    Sublinhando que a evocação dos acontecimentos que tiveram lugar ab origine convergir, segundo a perspectiva mítico-religiosa, para a manifestação das sagradas, de acordo com o referencial teórico-conceitual de Eliade, o artigo assinala que tal invocação implica uma correlação de narrativas míticas e gestos e ações paradigmáticas que se destinam a suscitar o poder sagrado e a produção de seus efeitos, ressaltando a prece como poder mágico de exercer influência sobrenatural, como afirma Mauss. Dessa forma, analisando a oração que ressalta o (...)
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  45. Can a Robot Lie? Exploring the Folk Concept of Lying as Applied to Artificial Agents.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (10):e13032.
    The potential capacity for robots to deceive has received considerable attention recently. Many papers explore the technical possibility for a robot to engage in deception for beneficial purposes (e.g., in education or health). In this short experimental paper, I focus on a more paradigmatic case: robot lying (lying being the textbook example of deception) for nonbeneficial purposes as judged from the human point of view. More precisely, I present an empirical experiment that investigates the following three questions: (a) Are ordinary (...)
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  46. Norms of assertion in the United States, Germany, and Japan.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118 (37):e2105365118.
    The recent controversy about misinformation has moved a question into the focus of the public eye that has occupied philosophers for decades: Under what conditions is it appropriate to assert a certain claim? When asserting a claim that x, must one know that x? Must x be true? Might it be normatively acceptable to assert whatever one believes? In the largest cross-cultural study to date (total n = 1,091) on the topic, findings from the United States, Germany, and Japan suggest (...)
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  47. Separating the evaluative from the descriptive: An empirical study of thick concepts.Pascale Willemsen & Kevin Reuter - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2):135-146.
    Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...)
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  48. Conditionals and specific links—an experimental study.Wojciech Rostworowski, Natalia Pietrulewicz & Marcin Bedkowski - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7365-7399.
    Based on the new experimental evidence, we argue that a link between a conditional antecedent and the consequent is semantically expressed rather than pragmatically conveyed. In our paper, we focus on particular kinds of links which conditionals may convey in a context. For instance, a conditional ‘If p, q’ may convey a thought equivalent to ‘p will cause q’, ‘p is the best explanation for q’, ‘q follows from p’, etcetera. The traditional theoretical literature on conditionals seems to imply that (...)
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  49. Predicates of personal taste: empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6455-6471.
    According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It (...)
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  50. Editorial introduction to ‘truth: concept meets property’.Jeremy Wyatt - 2020 - Synthese 198 (2):591-603.
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