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It’s in the Abstract: Knobe and X-Phi’s Claim to Originality.
I often think that some – perhaps much – of the recent work in moral psychology and X-Phi does a good job of repeating the findings of other fields and forms of enquiries. One the one hand, this has value, on the other, the findings presented in such work are often presented as if they were novel. In so doing some of those working in the field can give the impression that they are largely unaware of related work in other fields. Consider the following abstract that I came across earlier today:
“It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.”
Knobe, J. 2010. Person as scientist, person as moralist. Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 33(4): 315-29. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10000907
Let’s take it step by step:
“It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation.”
Well, it is certainly true that Piaget considered the way in which children learn about the world could be likened to them being mini-scientists. However, there has been a lot of criticism of such views since then and even at the time Vygotsky took a rather different line. Perhaps this is unfair. Rather than talking about academic enquiries Knobe is talking about the more prosaic presumptions of ordinary people. If so, this seems decidedly odd. Ordinary people, or so we are led to believe, tend to think that scientists are boffins, off in ivory towers doing strange things in laboratory’s.
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