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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Methodological Challenges For Empirical Approaches To Ethics, Christopher Shirreff
Methodological Challenges For Empirical Approaches To Ethics, Christopher Shirreff
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The central question for this dissertation is, how do we do moral philosophy well from within a broadly naturalist framework? Its main goal is to lay the groundwork for a methodological approach to moral philosophy that integrates traditional, intuition-driven approaches to ethics with empirical approaches that employ empirical data from biology and cognitive science. Specifically, it explores what restrictions are placed on our moral theorizing by findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, and how we can integrate this data while still offering a fully normative account of ethics. To that end, the dissertation explores the methodological assumptions …
Epistemic Injustice And Suicidality, Sam Lilly
Epistemic Injustice And Suicidality, Sam Lilly
Honors Program Theses
This paper extends both Miranda Fricker's framework regarding epistemic injustice, found in her book 'Epistemic Injustice, as well as Ian James Kidd and Havi Carel's essay "Epistemic Injustice and Illness" to a small population of people who identify internally with the desire to kill oneself i.e. suicidality. I argue that a certain population of suicidal people are especially vulnerable targets of epistemic injustice.
Ethics, X-Phi, And The Expanded Methodological Toolbox: How The Think Aloud Method And Interview Reveal People’S Judgments On Issues In Ethics And Beyond, Kyle Thompson
CGU Theses & Dissertations
Ethics isn’t a conversation exclusive to philosophers. There is value, then, in not only understanding how laypeople think about issues in ethics, but also bringing their judgments into dialogue with those of philosophers in order to make sense of agreement, disagreement, and the consequences of each. Experimental philosophers facilitate this dialogue uniquely by capturing laypeople’s judgments and analyzing them in light of philosophical theory. They have done so almost exclusively by using face valid quantitative surveys about philosophically interesting thought experiments. Based on high participant support for this or that response, researchers conclude that a given theory is more or …
On Philosophical Intuitions, Nicholas D. Mcginnis
On Philosophical Intuitions, Nicholas D. Mcginnis
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
I will argue that the scientific investigation of philosophical intuition ('experimental philosophy') is of philosophical interest. I will defend the significance of experimental philosophy against two important types of objection. I will term the first objection 'eliminativism' about intuitions: roughly, it is the claim that philosophical methodology does not in fact rely on intuition, and thus experimental philosophy's investigation is ill-conceived—in the words of one such opponent, 'a big mistake.' I will then consider a second objection, the 'expertise' defence. The expertise defence argues that the expert intuitions of professional philosophers are distinct, and to be preferred to those of …
The Non-Moral Basis Of Cognitive Biases Of Moral Intuitions, Bradley Charles Thomas
The Non-Moral Basis Of Cognitive Biases Of Moral Intuitions, Bradley Charles Thomas
Philosophy Theses
Against moral intuitionism, which holds that moral intuitions can be non-inferentially justified, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that moral intuitions are unreliable and must be confirmed to be justified (i.e. must be justified inferentially) because they are subject to cognitive biases. However, I suggest this is merely a renewed version of the argument from disagreement against intuitionism. As such, I attempt to show that the renewed argument is subject to an analogous objection as the old one; many cognitive biases of moral intuitions result from biases of non-moral judgments. Thus, the unreliability of moral intuitions due to biases (and the reason inferential …
Under Pressure From The Empirical Data: Does Externalism Rest On A Mistaken Psychological Theory?, Bryan Temples Miller
Under Pressure From The Empirical Data: Does Externalism Rest On A Mistaken Psychological Theory?, Bryan Temples Miller
Philosophy Theses
The tradition of semantic externalism that follows Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) is built on the assumption that the folk have essentialist commitments about natural kinds. Externalists commonly take the body of empirical data concerning psychological essentialism as support for this claim. However, recent empirical findings (Malt, 1994; Kalish, 2002) call the psychological theory of essentialism into question. This thesis examines the relevance of these findings to both essentialism and semantic externalism. I argue that these findings suggest that these theories fail to reflect folk beliefs about natural kinds and folk natural kind term usage. This leads me to propose …