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  1.  58
    The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2015 - Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Edited by Jonathan Livengood.
    In recent years, developments in experimental philosophy have led many thinkers to reconsider their central assumptions and methods. It is not enough to speculate and introspect from the armchair - philosophers must subject their claims to scientific scrutiny, looking at evidence and in some cases conducting new empirical research. "The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy" is an introduction and guide to the systematic collection and analysis of empirical data in academic philosophy. This book serves two purposes: first, it examines (...)
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  2. Philosophical temperament.Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, Richard Scheines & Edouard Machery - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):313-330.
    Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: what are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important aspect of the philosophical temperament is that philosophers are especially reflective: they are less likely than their peers to embrace what (...)
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  3. A New Perspective Concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2):315-332.
    Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [2004; forthcoming] use experimental methods to raise a spectre of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke's G del example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants' intuitions about semantic reference (...)
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  4. The Folk Probably Don’t Think What You Think They Think: Experiments on Causation by Absence.Jonathan Livengood & Edouard Machery - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):107–127.
    Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. (...)
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  5. God knows (but does God believe?).Dylan Murray, Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):83-107.
    The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...)
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  6. Reference in the Land of the Rising Sun: A Cross-cultural Study on the Reference of Proper Names.Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood, Ryoji Sato & Mineki Oguchi - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):213-230.
    A standard methodology in philosophy of language is to use intuitions as evidence. Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich challenged this methodology with respect to theories of reference by presenting empirical evidence that intuitions about one prominent example from the literature on the reference of proper names vary between Westerners and East Asians. In response, Sytsma and Livengood conducted experiments to show that the questions Machery and colleagues asked participants in their study were ambiguous, and that this ambiguity affected the responses (...)
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  7. Deep trouble for the deep self.David Rose, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma & Edouard Machery - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):629 - 646.
    Chandra Sripada's (2010) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a causal role in people's intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions?a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robust (Sripada & Konrath, 2011). In (...)
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  8. Two types of typicality: Rethinking the role of statistical typicality in ordinary causal attributions.Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood & David Rose - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (4):814-820.
    Empirical work on the use of causal language by ordinary people indicates that their causal attributions tend to be sensitive not only to purely descriptive considerations, but also to broadly moral considerations. For example, ordinary causal attributions appear to be highly sensitive to whether a behavior is permissible or impermissible. Recently, however, a consensus view has emerged that situates the role of permissibility information within a broader framework: According to the consensus, ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to whether or not (...)
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  9. Actual Causation and Compositionality.Jonathan Livengood & Justin Sytsma - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (1):43-69.
    Many theories of actual causation implicitly endorse the claim that if c is an actual cause of e, then either c causes e directly or every intermediary by which c indirectly causes e is itself both an actual cause of e and also an actual effect of c. We think this compositionality constraint is plausible. However, as we show, it is not always satisfied by the causal attributions ordinary people make. We conclude by considering what philosophers working on causation should (...)
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  10. (1 other version)Following the FAD: Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation.Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma & David Rose - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):273-294.
    In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum, according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article, we consider a small collection of (...)
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  11.  96
    Debunking material induction.Jonathan Livengood & Daniel Z. Korman - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 84:20-27.
    We present an explanatory objection to Norton's material theory of induction, as applied to predictive inferences. According to the objection we present, there is an explanatory disconnect between our beliefs about the future and the relevant future facts. We argue that if we recognize such a disconnect, we are no longer rationally entitled to our future beliefs.
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  12. Actual Causation and Simple Voting Scenarios.Jonathan Livengood - 2011 - Noûs 47 (2):316-345.
    Several prominent, contemporary theories of actual causation maintain that in order for something to count as an actual cause (in the circumstances) of some known effect, the potential cause must be a difference-maker with respect to the effect in some restricted range of circumstances. Although the theories disagree about how to restrict the range of circumstances that must be considered in deciding whether something counts as an actual cause of a known effect, the theories agree that at least some counterfactual (...)
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  13. Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism.Zachary Horne & Jonathan Livengood - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1189-1218.
    One widely-endorsed argument in the experimental philosophy literature maintains that intuitive judgments are unreliable because they are influenced by the order in which thought experiments prompting those judgments are presented. Here, we explicitly state this argument from ordering effects and show that any plausible understanding of the argument leads to an untenable conclusion. First, we show that the normative principle is ambiguous. On one reading of the principle, the empirical observation is well-supported, but the normative principle is false. On the (...)
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  14. Experimental Philosophy and Causal Attribution.Jonathan Livengood & David Rose - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 434–449.
    Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.
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  15. Probability and Informed Consent.Nir Ben-Moshe, Benjamin A. Levinstein & Jonathan Livengood - 2023 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (6):545-566.
    In this paper, we illustrate some serious difficulties involved in conveying information about uncertain risks and securing informed consent for risky interventions in a clinical setting. We argue that in order to secure informed consent for a medical intervention, physicians often need to do more than report a bare, numerical probability value. When probabilities are given, securing informed consent generally requires communicating how probability expressions are to be interpreted and communicating something about the quality and quantity of the evidence for (...)
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  16.  49
    Counting experiments.Jonathan Livengood - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):175-195.
    In this paper, I show how one might resist two influential arguments for the Likelihood Principle by appealing to the ontological significance of creative intentions. The first argument for the Likelihood Principle that I consider is the argument from intentions. After clarifying the argument, I show how the key premiss in the argument may be resisted by maintaining that creative intentions sometimes independently matter to what experiments exist. The second argument that I consider is Gandenberger’s :475–503, 2015) rehabilitation of Birnbaum’s (...)
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  17.  64
    Intervention, Bias, Responsibility… and the Trolley Problem.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - unknown
    In this paper, we consider three competing explanations of the empirical finding that people’s causal attributions are responsive to normative details, such as whether an agent’s action violated an injunctive norm—the intervention view, the bias view, and the responsibility view. We then present new experimental evidence concerning a type of case not previously investigated in the literature. In the switch version of the trolley problem, people judge that the bystander ought to flip the switch, but they also judge that she (...)
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  18.  55
    On experimental philosophy and the history of philosophy: a reply to Sorell.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - 2019 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (3):635-647.
    ABSTRACTIn this paper, we reply to Tom Sorell’s criticism of our engagement with the history of philosophy in our book, The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy. We explain why our uses of the history of philosophy are not undermined by Sorell’s criticism and why our position is not threatened by the dilemma Sorell advances. We argue that Sorell has mischaracterized the dialectical context of our discussion of the history of philosophy and that he has mistakenly treated our use of (...)
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  19.  27
    Behavior Genetic Frameworks of Causal Reasoning for Personality Psychology.Daniel Briley, Jonathan Livengood & Jaime Derringer - 2018 - European Journal of Personality 32 (3).
    Identifying causal relations from correlational data is a fundamental challenge in personality psychology. In most cases, random assignment is not feasible, leaving observational studies as the primary methodological tool. Here, we document several techniques from behavior genetics that attempt to demonstrate causality. Although no one method is conclusive at ruling out all possible confounds, combining techniques can triangulate on causal relations. Behavior genetic tools leverage information gained by sampling pairs of individuals with assumed genetic and environmental relatedness or by measuring (...)
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  20.  68
    Why Was M. S. Tswett’s Chromatographic Adsorption Analysis Rejected?Jonathan Livengood - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (1):57-69.
    The present paper claims that M. S. Tswett’s chromatographic adsorption analysis, which today is a ubiquitous and instrumentally sophisticated chemical technique, was either ignored or outright rejected by chemists and botanists in the first three decades of the twentieth century because it did not make sense in terms of accepted chemical theory or practice. Evidence for this claim is culled from consideration of the botanical and chemical context of Tswett’s technique as well as an analysis of the protracted debate over (...)
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  21.  45
    Calibrating Chromatography: How Tswett Broke the Experimenters’ Regress.Jonathan Livengood & Adam Edwards - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):685-710.
    We propose a new account of calibration according to which calibrating a technique shows that the technique does what it is supposed to do. To motivate our account, we examine an early twentieth-century debate about chlorophyll chemistry and Mikhail Tswett’s use of chromatographic adsorption analysis to study it. We argue that Tswett’s experiments established that his technique was reliable in the special case of chlorophyll without relying on either a theory or a standard calibration experiment. We suggest that Tswett broke (...)
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  22.  26
    Empirical Investigations: Reflecting on Turing and Wittgenstein on Thinking Machines.Jonathan Livengood & Justin Sytsma - unknown
    In the opening paragraph of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Alan Turing famously notes that “if the meaning of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, ‘Can machines think?’ is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll.” He then immediately responds, “But this is absurd.” But why is this absurd, if indeed (...)
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  23.  27
    On Experimental Philosophy and the History of Philosophy: Extended Remarks.Justin Sytsma & Jonathan Livengood - unknown
    In this paper, we reply to Tom Sorell’s criticism of our engagement with the history of philosophy in our book, The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy. We explain why our uses of the history of philosophy are not undermined by Sorell’s criticism and why our position is not threatened by the dilemma Sorell advances. We argue that Sorell has mischaracterized the dialectical context of our discussion of the history of philosophy and that he has mistakenly treated our use of (...)
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