In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage (...) in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition in 24 sites, located in 23 countries and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely (...) asserts that p, non-linguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

The idea of the present Issue originated in a workshop held at the University of Urbino, Italy, in June 2014, and subsequently developed into an independent editorial project by including contributions that were not initially presented at the workshop. The eight essays that follow authored by young and emerging philosophers as well as fully accomplished ones—touch upon various aspects of the most recent debate surrounding TEs, closely engaging with many influential proposals that have been put forward over the last few (...) years. They can be organised around three main areas of concern. The first group deals with general issues raised by the use of TEs, such as the possibility of drawing a principled distinction between scientific and philosophical TEs (Marco Buzzoni), the role played by intuitions within philosophical TEs (Julia Langkau), and the different ways in which the intended conclusion of a TE can be resisted (Roy Sorensen). The second group focuses on the logical form of philosophical TEs (Sören Häggqvist; Daniele Sgaravatti), and on the kind of access to modal knowledge they are standardly taken to provide (Vittorio Morato). The third and last group explores the virtues and limits of TEs used in two specific philosophical areas, namely the philosophy of science (Margherita Benzi), and the philosophy of mind (Elizabeth Schier). (shrink)

The e-mail address of the second author was incorrectly published in the original article. The author’s correct e-mail address is given in this correction.

A draft of a possible comparison between the use made of mathematics in classical field theories and in quantum mechanics is presented. Hilbert’s space formalism, although not only elegant and powerful but intuitive as well, does not give us a spatio-temporal representation of physical events. The picture of the electromagnetic field as an entity which is real in itself– i.e., as a wave without support – fostered by the emergence of special relativity can be seen as the first step, favored (...) by many physicists and philosophers, of a gradual “escape” from intuition into a purely mathematical representation of the external world. After the introduction, in recent theoretical physics, of fiber bundle formalism the classical notion of field acquires a new spatio-temporal intuitiveness. This intuitiveness is clearly foreshadowed in the Kantian and Meinongian analysis of the notion of magnitude. At the end of the paper we show that, contrary to what happens in quantum mechanics, mathematics plays a truly explicative role in general relativity, without any loss of spatio-temporal intuitiveness. (shrink)

Mathematical models can be profitably used to establish whether our perception of the external world is accurate. Donald Hoffman and his collaborators have developed a promising mathematical framework within which this question can be addressed and which is based on an exhaustive taxonomy of the different possible relations between perceptual representations and the external world. After reformulating their framework by means of an improved formal system, we discuss their application of evolutionary game theory, which appears to show that an essentially (...) anti-realistic perceptual strategy would in the long run biologically outcompete its rivals. We argue that their model does not take the crucial biological significance of environmental changes into due consideration and propose alternative models which do. We conclude that a partially realistic representation would be favoured in our models. (shrink)