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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
How To Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects For A New Methodology, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder
How To Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects For A New Methodology, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder
Attila Tanyi
Examining folk intuitions about philosophical questions lies at the core of experimental philosophy. This requires both a good account of what intuitions are and methods allowing to assess them. We propose to combine philosophical and psychological conceptualisations of intuitions by focusing on three of their features: immediacy, lack of inferential relations, and stability. Once this account of intuition is at hand, we move on to propose a methodology that can test all three characteristics without eliminating any of them. In the final part of the paper, we propose implementations of the new methodology as applied to the experimental investigation of …
Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder
Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach, Attila Tanyi, Martin Bruder
Attila Tanyi
According to act-consequentialism the right action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impersonal perspective. Some claim that this requirement is unreasonably demanding and therefore consequentialism is unacceptable as a moral theory. The article breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. Instead of focusing on theoretical responses, it empirically investigates whether there exists a widely shared intuition that consequentialist demands are unreasonable. This discussion takes the form of examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In two experiments, the article finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist …
The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal
The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal
Gregory Brazeal
Why is it that philosophy seems unable to obtain the kinds of agreement regularly achieved by mathematics and the natural sciences? The experimental philosophy movement emphasizes conflicting intuitions as a potential source of philosophical disagreement. This essay draws attention to another, complementary source: the logical imperfection of natural languages. Unlike logic as it is formalized in symbolic notation, the rules governing the correct use of terms in a natural language can be indeterminate, underdetermined, and inconsistent. Though most philosophers recognize the logical imperfection of natural languages in the abstract, everyday philosophical discussion is often conducted as though the argumentative moves …