Online research in philosophy

In this paper I propose a new account of luck and how luck impacts attributions of credit for agents' actions. I propose an analogy with the expected value of a series of wagers and argue that luck is what we call the difference between actual outcomes and expected value. The upshot of my argument is that when considering the interplay of intention, chance, outcomes, skill, and actions, we ought to be more parsimonious in our attributions of credit when exercising a (...) skill and obtaining successful outcomes, and more generous in our attributions of credit when exercising a skill but obtaining unsuccessful outcomes. Furthermore, I will argue that when agents skillfully perform an action, they deserve the same amount of credit whether their action is successful or unsuccessful in achieving the goal. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is often held out as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. We distinguish two views of experimental philosophy—a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the co-location in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both pro (...) and con. We argue first that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. We then show both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting our broad conception of experimental philosophy. (shrink)