Nathan Emmerich

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:

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. 

As such, suggesting that ordinary people use much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation is a commonly held view seems open to question. Despite the assertion of the following sentence, it would seem that this view is rather less widely held than Knobe leads us to believe. Nevertheless, Knobe is correct to say that:

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.

Knobe’s paper then sets out to consider to two alternative explanations:

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.

The first approach is, in essence, the claim that various socio-cultural phenomena distort our ordinary thinking, with the implication being that science is successful when scientists are able to overcome these influences. This is broadly compatible with the Piaget’s psychology and with the view that people's ordinary capacities for understanding are, at root, comparable to those of scientists – it is just that various phenomena happen to get in way.

The second implies that thought is entangled with a variety of phenomena often presumed to be a source of bias. This is problematic for our – or scientists – ability to think in an unbiased manner. Interesting, a particular implication of thise perspective remains unremarked. It to implies that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world is not dissimilar to that of scientists, albeit because scientists turn out not to be all that different from ordinary people, rather than the other way around.

The conclusion argued for is in favour of this second view: 

I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.

This conclusion would suggest that it is wrong to think that “people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation,” at least insofar as this is taken to mean people think like scientists, and not the other way around. In my view very few ordinary people or academic researchers do think this, so Knobe’s conclusion would not seem to be particularly surprising.

Furthermore, there is a great deal of literature in both the history and sociology of science that suggest moral considerations have an important role to play in the scientist’s cognitive competencies. Indeed, the very point of such enquires is to demonstrate that science is not an acultural phenomena but, rather, that science is a particular kind of cultural formation and that this has normative implications for the way in which science is practiced. A particular favourite of mine is Daston and Galison’s history of objectivity. In it they suggest that scientists inhabit a particular ethos, a morality, and that this is embedded in their character or, better, their scientific character. This idea, and those in the fields of the history and sociology of science, have already come to the conclusion that scientific research has a distinctive, and ineliminable, moral dimension.

That said, few argue scientists are moralists, as Knobe’s title would seem to imply. Perhaps Knobe means something different by the term moralist, but to my mind not all those whose practices have culturally normative underpinnings can be understood as moralists. Scientists are, of course, quite capable of moralising. Richard Dawkins, for example, can be considered to be both evangelical and relatively fundamentalist in his presentation of what he considers to be the scientific worldview. Nevertheless, this can be distinguished from the cultural values and moral considerations that inform and underpin the practice(s) of scientific research.

This is, or so I deduce from the abstract, what Knobe’s paper seeks to suggest: the view that what scientists do is not entirely dissimilar to people's ordinary capacities for understanding; both are intimately shaped by the epistemologically normative dimensions of the cultures they inhabit. As such scientists are ordinary people who operate in relatively extra-ordinary cultural context. In conclusion then: who knew.

This is, of course merely one example. Perhaps much of the research that goes on under the aegis of X-Phi (and moral psychology) is indeed producing novel results. Or, at least, is replete with references to work in other fields. I would not, however, have been promoted to write this blog if I thought this was an isolated case.