An important and original new contribution to lesbian and gay studies, We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Presenting political, historical, legal, literary, and psychological documents which trace the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, it includes documents as diverse as organization pamphlets, essays, polemics, speeches, newspaper and journal articles, and academic papers. We Are Everywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century by (...) Karl Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, and John Addington Symonds; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications such as Mattachine Review , The Ladder and ONE ; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within "the movement" (bisexuals, S/M, conservatives); and finally, a look at the future of lesbian and gay politics. Together the documents allow readers to examine a diverse set of issues: the concept of gay love before "homosexuality," the development of political movements based on homosexual identity, the history of government persecution of homosexuality, the impact of feminism on the modern lesbian and gay rights movement, and the emergence of queer theory. (shrink)

Pragmatics is the study of the role of context in communication. This chapter discusses experimental research in pragmatics. It provides clarity on pragmatics by contrasting the role of context in communication with the role of sentence meaning. There is some disagreement about which communicative effects are due to which thing, so there is some disagreement as to where to draw the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The chapter considers a rich experimental research project in pragmatics, which has developed primarily within (...) linguistics and psychology over the course of the last several decades in response to the boundary disputes. Finally, it talks about a more nascent experimental research project, which, building upon insights from psychology, aims towards understanding survey pragmatics. These two projects are discussed and attention is paid to the methods unique to each project and the philosophical and linguistic underpinnings they share in common. (shrink)

Philosophical tradition has long held that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. We report experimental results that show that the folk do not think free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Our results also suggest that experimental investigation of the relationship is ill served by a focus on incompatibilism versus compatibilism. We propose an alternative framework for empirical moral psychology in which judgments of free will and moral responsibility can vary independently in response to many factors. We also suggest (...) that, in response to some factors, the necessity relation may run from responsibility to free will. (shrink)

Many moral philosophers have assumed that ordinary folk embrace moral objectivism. But, if so, why do folk embrace objectivism? One possibility is the pervasive connection between religion and morality in ordinary life. Some theorists contend that God is viewed as a divine guarantor of right and wrong, rendering morality universal and absolute. But is belief in God per se sufficient for moral objectivism? In this paper, we present original research exploring the connections between metaethics and particular conceptions of God among (...) religious participants. Study 1 shows that, when controlling for religiosity, age, and belief in God’s loving characteristics, it is belief in God’s punishing characteristics (specifically, the existence of Hell) that uniquely predicts rejection of moral relativism. Study 2 shows that followers of Abrahamic faiths are more likely to endorse moral objectivism when thinking of the Divine, regardless of loving or punishing characteristics. And Study 3 shows that priming for moral objectivism makes theists more likely to endorse God’s punishing characteristics. A general picture is suggested by these data. For Abrahamic theists, God’s particular characteristics are not germane to the question of whether his moral commandments are real and objective. And while theists strongly endorse God’s loving characteristics, focusing on the objective nature of morality can highlight God’s punishing nature, reminding theists that objective morality requires a divine guarantor of justice to enforce it. (shrink)

Recent and puzzling experimental results suggest that people’s judgments as to whether or not an action was performed intentionally are sensitive to moral considerations. In this paper, we outline these results and evaluate two accounts which purport to explain them. We then describe a recent experiment that allegedly vindicates one of these accounts and present our own findings to show that it fails to do so. Finally, we present additional data suggesting no such vindication could be in the offing and (...) that, in fact, both accounts fail to explain the initial, puzzling results they were purported to explain. (shrink)

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege that we can gain (...) important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

Abstract: Recently, the experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe has shown that the folk are more inclined to describe side effects as intentional actions when they bring about bad results. Edouard Machery has offered an intriguing new explanation of Knobe's work—the 'trade-off hypothesis'—which denies that moral considerations explain folk applications of the concept of intentional action. We critique Machery's hypothesis and offer empirical evidence against it. We also evaluate the current state of the debate concerning the concept of intentionality, and argue that, (...) given the number of variables at play, any parsimonious account of the relevant data is implausible. (shrink)

According to the discontinuity view, people recognize a deep discontinuity between phenomenal and intentional states, such that they refrain from attributing feelings and experiences to entities that do not have the right kind of body, though they may attribute thoughts to entities that lack a biological body, like corporations, robots, and disembodied souls. We examine some of the research that has been used to motivate the discontinuity view. Specifically, we focus on experiments that examine people's aptness judgments for various mental (...) state ascriptions to groups. These studies seem to reveal that people are more inclined to think of groups as having intentionality than as having phenomenology. Combined with the fact that groups obviously lack a single biological body, this has been taken as evidence that people operate according to the relevant discontinuity. However, these studies support discontinuity only on the assumption that the experimental participants are interpreting the relevant group mental state ascriptions in a specific way. We present evidence that people are not interpreting these ascriptions in a way that supports discontinuity. Instead, we argue that people generally interpret group mental state ascriptions distributively, as attributions of mental states to various group members. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind typically group experiential states together and distinguish these from intentional states on the basis of their purportedly obvious phenomenal character. Sytsma and Machery (Phil Stud 151(2): 299–327, 2010) challenge this dichotomy by presenting evidence that non-philosophers do not classify subjective experiences relative to a state’s phenomenological character, but rather by its valence. However we argue that S&M’s results do not speak to folk beliefs about the nature of experiential states, but rather to folk beliefs about the entity (...) to which those experiential states are attributed. In two experiments, we demonstrate that ordinary attributions of subjective experiences (of smell and felt emotions) to a simple robot are not sensitive to valence, but instead respond to functional assumptions about the entity to which the states are (or are not) attributed. (shrink)

We evaluate the role of embodiment in ordinary mental state ascriptions. Presented are five experiments on phenomenal state ascriptions to disembodied entities such as ghosts and spirits. Results suggest that biological embodiment is not a central principle of folk psychology guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness. By contrast, results continue to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments.

Philosophers have alleged that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate. They have presented this inadequacy as a datum predicted by, and thus a reason to accept, particular accounts of ‘metaphorical meanings.’ But to what, specifically, does this inadequacy claim amount? I argue that, if this assumption is to have any bearing on the metaphor debate, it must be construed as the comparative claim that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate compared to paraphrases of literal utterances. But the evidence philosophers have offered does (...) not support the comparative inadequacy of paraphrases of metaphors. I offer my own empirical evidence against the inadequacy assumption. (shrink)

We argue that the causal account offered by analytic functionalism provides the best account of the folk psychological theory of mind, and that people ordinarily define mental states relative to the causal roles these states occupy in relation to environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states. We present new empirical evidence, as well as review several key studies on mental state ascription to diverse types of entities such as robots, cyborgs, corporations and God, and explain how this evidence supports (...) a functional account. We also respond to two challenges to this view based on the embodiment hypothesis, or the claim that physical realizers matter over and above functional role, and qualia. In both cases we conclude that research to date best supports a functional account of ordinary mental state concepts. (shrink)

In the past several decades, psychologists and linguists have begun experimentally investigating linguistic pragmatic phenomena. They share the assumption that the best way to study the use of language in context incorporates an experimental methodology, here understood to comprise controlled studies and careful field observations. This article surveys some key projects in experimental pragmatics and relates these projects to ongoing philosophical discussions.

Cathy Mason (2020) argues – against my position in Phelan (2019) – that significant norm-manipulation is unnecessary for friendship. Instead, she holds that norm manipulation is a, perhaps omnipresent, causal result of the very feature I deny as necessary to friendship: mutual caring or love. Mason’s counter-examples allow for further explication of the norm-manipulation view of friendship. However, they do not constitute a compelling challenge to that view, because they do not seem to involve collaborative norm manipulation at all. (...) Instead, they are better described as cases in which people come to be subject to established cultural norms they were not previously subject to, because they voluntarily come to fall under a distinctive relationship relative to one another. (shrink)

This short paper, forthcoming as part of a symposium on experimental philosophy to appear in the popular publication, The Philosophers’ Magazine (including contributions by Papineau, Stich, Machery, Sommers, and Knobe), offers an accessible summary of seven years of experimental-philosophical research into intentional action attributions.

The desire for parsimony – to posit as few explanatory features as possible – has a rich philosophical history and is often given lots of weight in philosophical theory construction. But, as the psychologist Tania Lombrozo has demonstrated, our bias in favour of parsimony can lead us to adopt simple explanations even when it’s far more likely that a complicated explanation is correct.

Sally and Sid have worked together for a while, and Sally knows Sid to be a hard worker. She might make this point about him by saying, “Sid is a hard worker.” Or, she might make it by saying, “Sid is a Sherman tank.” We all recognize that there is some distinction between the first assertion, in which Sally is speaking literally, and the second, in which she is speaking figuratively. This is a distinction that any theory of figurative language (...) worth its salt should capture. But, as I will argue, it is a distinction that contemporary accounts of figurative language fail to successfully explain. This is because such theories have been mostly concerned to explore the nature of figurative understanding and the status of figurative meanings. Perhaps proponents of these theories suppose that, by appealing to a special kind of figurative meaning, we can eventually explain the difference between speaking literally and speaking figuratively. I believe this approach gets the order of explanation backwards. I contend that accounts of figurative meaning and understanding can only be fully articulated against a prior account of the distinction between figurative and literal language. What’s more, once my account of figurative language is in place, we can begin to see why people bother speaking figuratively at all, or so I will argue. (shrink)

The desire for parsimony – to posit as few explanatory features as possible – has a rich philosophical history and is often given lots of weight in philosophical theory construction. But, as the psychologist Tania Lombrozo has demonstrated, our bias in favour of parsimony can lead us to adopt simple explanations even when it’s far more likely that a complicated explanation is correct.

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

There are two prominent features of contemporary literary criticism that give the pluralist his initial direction. First, the field is marked by a multiplicity of discourses: formalism, deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, to name just a few, as well as various syntheses of two or more of these discourses. Second, the dominant activity of literary critics is, as it has been since the rise of the New Criticism in the 1930s, the interpretation of individual texts. When faced with (...) the task of sorting out the relations among the different interpretations offered by the different discourses, the pluralist, by definition, will want to say that many of them are equally valid and simultaneously that some interpretations are weaker than others. Stated this way, the position seems straightforward. Yet once the pluralist begins to follow this direction, to work out the implications of this general stance, he very quickly becomes involved in many knotty issues that take him right to the disciplinary core of criticism. In the rest of this essay, I shall explore several of those issues, including whether the move to pluralism also commits one to metapluralism and whether pluralism as a metaposition has any genuine consequences for practical criticism. I shall begin, however, not with either of those important issues but with one that is both more difficult and more fundamental: how does the pluralist define the literary text? (shrink)

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.

‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical and explanatory. It’s also partly a (...) reply to Sara Bernstein, who argued recently that the best interpretation of the metaphysical claim is explanatory priority. We’ll argue that duly clarified, it’s far from obvious that feminism had better be intersectional. At the very least, it had better not be only intersectional. (shrink)

The Irish Republic's economic success story has been simultaneously regarded as antithetical to and indicative of neoliberal hegemony. The question of the neoliberal pedigree of the Irish case is explored here from the perspective of mediatized representations of political economy. The paper's argument is advanced in three distinct stages. First, it outlines a theoretical and methodological rationale for the analysis itself. Second, it formulates a summary account of neoliberalism as discourse and ideology, introducing a key analytical distinction between ‘transparent’ and (...) ‘euphemized’ neoliberal discourses. Third, it presents an empirical overview of how neoliberal assumptions are articulated through mediatized representations of political economy. The article shows how the ‘Celtic Tiger’ can be understood as a case of neoliberal hegemony, as long as it is recognised that neoliberalism is hegemonically constituted through a plurality of discursive forms and rhetorical strategies. In addition, the paper highlights the constitutive role of media representation, especially the media rhetoric of Irish political leaders, in the production and reproduction of an Irish neoliberalism. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic framework for thinking about the relationship between language and technology and an argument for interweaving thinking about technology with thinking about language. The main claim of philosophy of technology—that technologies are not mere tools and artefacts not mere things, but crucially and significantly shape what we perceive, do, and are—is re-thought in a way that accounts for the role of language in human technological experiences and practices. Engaging with work by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, McLuhan, Searle, Ihde, (...) Latour, Ricoeur, and many others, the author critically responds to, and constructs a synthesis of, three "extreme", idealtype, untenable positions: only humans speak and neither language nor technologies speak, only language speaks and neither humans nor technologies speak, and only technology speaks and neither humans nor language speak. The construction of this synthesis goes hand in hand with a narrative about subjects and objects that become entangled and constitute one another. Using Words and Things thus draws in central discussions from other subdisciplines in philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics, to offer an original theory of the relationship between language and technology centered on use, performance, and narrative, and taking a transcendental turn. (shrink)

Study objectives The emergency department (ED) provides an arena for patient enrolment into a variety of research studies even for non-critically ill patients. Given the types of illness, time constraints and sense of urgency that exists in the ED environment, concern exists about whether research subjects in the ED can provide full consent for participation. We sought to identify enrolled research subjects' perspectives on the informed consent process for research conducted in the ED. Methods This was a prospective, observational study (...) of ED subjects, 18 years or older, who had been approached to participate in research in the ED and who were judged to have decision-making capacity. Exclusions were critical illness and refusal to participate. Subjective were followed up within 1 week after enrolling using structured phone interviews by trained interviewers. Results During the study period, 229 eligible patients were approached to participate in both a target study and this study. Of these, 66% (150/229) agreed to participate in this study, at least to the extent of allowing us access to their demographic data. The study participant group was similar in terms of gender to this particular ED's patient population but had significantly more African-Americans and persons older than 45. Conclusion Despite rigorous time constraints and rapid throughput times, the majority of subjects who consented to research participation in the ED felt that they were sufficiently informed and had adequate time to decide to participate. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral (...) virtues are exactly like friendship in all important respects, but rather to articulate a fruitful model in which to explore the virtues. Section 2 explores the relational nature of friendship, drawing on Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. Section 3 catalogues four motivations for taking seriously the friendship model of virtue. Section 4 applies the friendship model in depth to the virtue of trustworthiness. (shrink)

During multiple testing, researchers often adjust their alpha level to control the familywise error rate for a statistical inference about a joint union alternative hypothesis (e.g., “H1,1 or H1,2”). However, in some cases, they do not make this inference. Instead, they make separate inferences about each of the individual hypotheses that comprise the joint hypothesis (e.g., H1,1 and H1,2). For example, a researcher might use a Bonferroni correction to adjust their alpha level from the conventional level of 0.050 to 0.025 (...) when testing H1,1 and H1,2, find a significant result for H1,1 (p < 0.025) and not for H1,2 (p > .0.025), and so claim support for H1,1 and not for H1,2. However, these separate individual inferences do not require an alpha adjustment. Only a statistical inference about the union alternative hypothesis “H1,1 or H1,2” requires an alpha adjustment because it is based on “at least one” significant result among the two tests, and so it refers to the familywise error rate. Hence, an inconsistent correction occurs when a researcher corrects their alpha level during multiple testing but does not make an inference about a union alternative hypothesis. In the present article, I discuss this inconsistent correction problem, including its reduction in statistical power for tests of individual hypotheses and its potential causes vis-à-vis error rate confusions and the alpha adjustment ritual. I also provide three illustrations of inconsistent corrections from recent psychology studies. I conclude that inconsistent corrections represent a symptom of statisticism, and I call for a more nuanced inference-based approach to multiple testing corrections. (shrink)

Hirsch’s revision results from his attempt to think through the difficult question that underlies the whole essay: How does the movement of time and circumstance affect the stability of meaning? The first part of his answer is that the relation between original meaning and subsequent understanding or applications of that meaning is analogous to the relation between a concept and its extension. For example, if he reads Shakespeare’s sonnet 55 and applies it to his beloved, and one of us reads (...) it and applies it to his beloved, “that does not make the meaning of the sonnet different for us, assuming that we both understand that the text’s meaning is not limited to any particular exemplification but rather embraces many, many exemplifications” . That is, the sonnet has a status analogous to that of the concept “bicycle,” and the two applications have a status analogous to that of a three-speed and a ten-speed bicycle. Whereas Hirsch formerly considered such exemplifications part of a text’s significance, he now considers them part of its meaning. This revision indicates that for Hirsch meaning is not the product of a consciousness producing an intrinsic genre but of a consciousness communicating something broader and more general than an intrinsic genre—an intention-concept that can have numerous extensions or exemplifications, including many that the originating consciousness could not have anticipated. Formerly, Hirsch used intrinsic genre to describe that sense of the whole which governed the horizon of developing meaning and which, when the work was completed—when all the blanks were filled in—gave the work its specific determinate meaning. That is, determinacy of meaning was in large part a function of narrowing the class of implications; when the work was completed, the class of implications was restricted to those synonymous with expressed meaning. In short, in the old theory, meaning-intention is a “narrow,” not a broad “concept.” James L. Battersby, professor of English at Ohio State University, is the author of Rational Praise and Natural Lamentation: Johnson, Lycidas, and Principles of Criticism and Elder Olson: An Annotated Bibliography. He is currently at work on a study of the relationship between “thought” and structure in various genres. James Phelan is associate professor English at Ohio State University and the author of Worlds from Words: A Theory of language in Fiction. His work in progress concerns character and narrative progression. (shrink)