The Folk Philosophy Fallacy (Parts 1-5)

This blog consists of the complete set of parts 1-5 of the Twitter Tuesday series, The Folk Philosophy Fallacy. There is no additional content. I simply thought it’d be helpful to put all of those posts in one place for future readers.

One aspect of the meta-problem is the question: is the hard problem of consciousness universal? In its starkest form, one could put this as a question about judgment universality: does everyone (or at least every normal adult human) judge that there is a hard problem of consciousness? Does everyone make judgments along the lines of the intuitions above? The answer to this question is obviously no. Some theorists reject these judgments. Many people never consider them. In some cultures, the issue never seems to have been raised. (Chalmers, 2020)

Once again we have a philosopher claiming to know what ordinary people mean when they employ certain terms or concepts. According to Dominik:

What ordinary people mean by consciousness ARE the phenomenal properties. So if you deny those, then you DO deny consciousness given ordinary English.

Dominik echoes a sentiment many professional philosophers have expressed. Wyrwa (2022) documents several examples:

• “phenomenal consciousness is the most folk psychologically obvious thing or feature that the positive examples [of conscious mental states] possess” (Schwitzgebel, 2016, p. 230, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “The great strength of this commonsense definition — consciousness is experience — is that it is completely obvious. What could be simpler?” (Koch, 2019, p. 3, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “even if we cannot say what it [consciousness] is, nonetheless each of us in the privacy of our own minds knows what it is” (Humphrey, 2006, p. 3, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

• “while ‘phenomenal consciousness’ is a technical term, the property it refers to is part of our common-sense picture of the world. Almost everyone believes that there is something that it’s like to be a hamster, but there is nothing that it’s like to be a rock or a planet” (Goff, 2017, p. 2, as quoted in Wyrwa, p. 47)

Unsystematic gathering of remarks hardly establishes the ubiquity of the presumption that nonphilosophers share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness as philosophers. However, it’s unlikely such presumptions are confined only to these examples, and even if they were, there’s nothing wrong with questioning assumptions that aren’t widely held, but still appear in the literature, especially when those remarks are made by leading figures in the field.

1.0 Who are ordinary people?

Philosophers often make claims about what “ordinary people” mean. If you aren’t familiar with the term, philosophers toss around a handful of loose labels for people who lack significant formal training in philosophy or have not engaged in a significant degree of philosophical reflection: “ordinary people,” “laypeople,” “the folk” or, as I prefer, “nonphilosophers.” 

These terms are intended to refer to “typical” people, and are used in contexts where the goal is to describe the way a “typical” person thinks, speaks, or acts. This does not mean philosophers aren’t aware that people differ, and that some “ordinary people” may be exceptional or unusual. While I have many critical things to say about philosophers, the notion of “ordinary people” is not necessarily objectionable, though I would note that the idea of a “typical person” may be a bit misleading: while we can meaningfully speak about a typical person in terms of various shared characteristics, e.g., typical physiological and behavioral characteristics, questions about psychological features may in many cases exhibit such considerable variation that while there may be something “typical” of people that is shared in common at a higher level of abstract, there may at a local level be very little in common. 

For example, it’s plausible that “typical” or “ordinary” people devise forms of entertainment for themselves, such as games or sports. So it would be reasonable to say that ordinary people often enjoy sports or games. But it would be extremely implausible to suppose that a typical person specifically enjoys chess or soccer. Chess and soccer are culturally contingent and highly parochial. Not all human societies have chess or soccer, and had history gone a bit differently, humanity could have been more or less the same, but without chess or soccer, and might instead play chmess and shmoccer (Dennett, 2006).

Whenever a philosopher speculates about what nonphilosophers think, they should consider the level of specificity: is the issue in question closer to “typical people like sports” or is it more like “typical people like soccer”? Such a question is difficult, because it’s not clear what level of specificity is appropriate without knowing more about human psychology. It cannot be known by a priori reasoning alone. No amount of reasoning or thinking about your concepts in your languages in your culture is going to necessarily yield insights into what  “ordinary people” are like. The only way to know how well our judgments generalize is by knowing more about human psychology. The problem is that psychology hasn’t answered these questions. At present, philosophers are left with little more than anecdotes and speculation and armchair theorizing that, at best, relies on educated guesses from a synthesis of the best available psychology. 

Another layer of difficulty is the lack of specification, especially in helpfully technical psychological terms, about what an ordinary person is. Philosophers may not have in mind some notion amenable to empirical investigation in the first place. An “ordinary person” may be some kind of hypothetical agent who meets some specified set of conditions that nobody in the real world ever actually meets, i.e., the philosophical equivalent of the spherical cow.  It would be helpful if philosophers who made claims about what “ordinary people” mean or think would be more precise. What I described above may not be exactly what Dominik has in mind, in which case Dominik is welcome to clarify.

Note the emphasis here on ordinary English. I often criticize analytic philosophy for its excessive focus on the meaning of English phrases in particular (and its comparative lack of concern for the 6000+ other languages). People occasionally object to drawing attention to this emphasis, which is weird, because analytic philosophy’s emphasis on English is hardly controversial. It would barely be misleading to call it “Anglophone philosophy.”

So here is an example you can add to the pile of similar instances in which there is an emphasis on English with little or no regard for how people may employ terms or concepts in other languages. Are all ordinary people English speakers? No. Can we generalize from how English speakers speak or think to how everyone else speaks or thinks? No, at least not without good evidence.

2.0 What do ordinary people mean by ‘consciousness’?

What do ordinary people mean by the term “consciousness” or the concept consciousness? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. How does Dominik know what ordinary people mean by “consciousness” or what they think about the concept consciousness? As I find myself repeating so often, this is an empirical question. Does the empirical literature support the claim that by “consciousness” ordinary people mean phenomenal properties?

No. It does not. There is a body of empirical research on the question of whether nonphilosophers share or employ the same notion of phenomenal properties as academic philosophers. However, this research has generally found little evidence to support such claims, with researchers generally concluding otherwise (see e.g., Sytsma & Machery, 2009; 2010, see also Knobe & Prinz, 2008). In outlining the mainstream interpretation of the literature, Wyrwa (2022) observes that while a handful of early studies (e.g. Huebner, Bruno, & Sarkissian, 2010; Knobe & Prinz, 2008; Peressini, 2014) seemed to indicate that nonphilosophers have some notion of phenomenal consciousness, these studies suffered from methodological shortcomings and subsequent findings failed to corroborate these results.

2.1 Peressini (2014)

For instance, Wyrwa (2022) notes Peressini (2014) provided participants with instructions that told them “how to understand the ‘experiencer’ and ‘non-experiencer’ categories,” meaning that “the study measured how they used these new concepts rather than their folk view about consciousness” (pp. 47-48).  Wyrwa cites Sytsma (2014), who initially drew attention to this concern:

The setup of Peressini’s study, however, prompts the concern that his materials taught participants the new category of ‘experiencer’. Thus, it might be that participants’ ratings simply reflect their judgments about the similarity of the entities tested to the examples given—a living human being versus mechanical artifacts (thermostats, burglar alarms, and bread machines). Given these examples, it is perhaps not sur- prising that participants tended to classify artifacts as ‘non-experiencers’. (p. 644)

If the goal of a philosopher is to find out how nonphilosophers outside of philosophical or other academic contexts, one cannot achieve this goal by furnishing people with novel terms and concepts, then asking them to select from among them. Once you do this, there is no way to know whether whatever judgments they made reflect how they thought prior to participating in your study, or whether the study itself prompted them to develop new (if transient) philosophical views, a process I call philosophical induction, the process whereby participants are prompted to think, speak, or reflect in such a way that they mirror and effectively become junior philosophers (Bush, 2023). However, as Sytsma notes, Peressini findings wouldn’t exactly support the claim that ordinary people share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness as philosophers, even if we accepted them at face value:

Further, while Peressini raises doubts about the first study in Sytsma and Machery’s original article, he ultimately concludes that they were correct to deny that lay people tend to have the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness, at least as we have articulated it above. (p. 644)

This is clear from Peressini’s own remarks:

My findings (1) reveal limitations in experimental approaches using “artificial experiencers” like robots, (2) indicate that the standard philosophical conception of subjective experience in terms of qualia is distinct from that of the folk, and (3) show that folk intuitions do support a conception of qualia that departs from the philosophical conception in that it is physical rather than metaphysical. (Peressini, 2014, p. 862, emphasis mine)

However, Peressini later remarks that the results of the second study make it clear “That participants have a concept of some sense of qualia or ‘phenomenality’” (p. 833, as quoted in Sytsma, p. 644, 2016). Such findings would at best provide only partial vindication for claims that the folk have a notion of phenomenal consciousness: even if they have some notion, it would appear to differ from what philosophers have in mind. 

2.2 Knobe & Prinz (2008)

Next, we have Knobe and Prinz (2008), hereafter “K&P”. This section is going to be a bit longer than is typical for these kinds of sections. I wanted to spend the time to actually dig into a study a bit, to show unfamiliar readers what they look like and how they work. A kind of window into the world of experimental philosophy, if you will. If that’s not of interest to you, feel free to skip this section and move on to section 3.

K&P present evidence that nonphilosophers distinguish between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states. Let’s take a look at how they do this. Knobe and Prinz begin with two hypotheses, but only the first is relevant to the question of whether nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness, so we will focus on that:

1. Nonphilosophers “have a concept of phenomenal consciousness” and use this concept when drawing distinctions between different mental states (p. 68).

K&P propose that people are receptive to indications of phenomenal consciousness (PC) when ascribing mental states to others. Some states require PC, while others do not. For instance, when we see that a person is in pain, we implicitly attribute PC to that person, while we may not do so when attributing other mental states (e.g., goals) to people or other agents (e.g., computers). Attributions of PC are not confined to pain alone, but encompass other mental states that draw on the concept of PC. They give a handful of examples:

Involve PC attribution:

• Sasha is vividly imagining a purple square. (p. 69)

• Sasha is experiencing intense joy.

Do not involve PC attribution:

• Sasha is wondering what to do

• Sasha is considering his options

To those familiar with the concept of phenomenal consciousness, there is nothing mysterious about the above distinction. The former two statements appear to refer to qualitative aspects of one’s experiences, whereas the latter are more “informational”: they involve deliberating or weighing up the pros and cons of different courses of action, something one might imagine a “nonconscious” machine can do, even if a machine does not have a first person point of view.

This study arose in the early days of experimental philosophy, but even then researchers were careful to address one common misunderstanding when people hear about studies like these: they are not claiming that nonphilosophers have an explicit theory or concept of phenomenal consciousness that they subscribe to:

To a first glance, this first hypothesis may seem a bit absurd. After all, it is clear that most people would not understand the words ‘phenomenal consciousness,’ and when one tries to explain the concept in a classroom, students often have trouble understanding what it amounts to. It would certainly be foolish, then, for us to suggest that people ordinarily have explicit beliefs about whether particular mental state types do or do not require phenomenal consciousness. But that is not at all what we have in mind. What we mean to suggest is rather that people grasp this concept at a purely tacit level. In other words, the suggestion is that people are actually applying the concept all the time; it’s just that they normally have no awareness of doing so. (p. 68)

Their second hypothesis is not as relevant to our concern here, but I’ll go over it anyway, since it sets the stage for the study that they conducted. 

K&P draw a distinction between the function of a state and the physical state of a given entity or object. Functional states center on the role things play, that is, what they do and what they’re for, while physical states refer to the substance and structure of the thing in question. For instance, if we were to talk about the function of memory, we might say that it is to store information for future use, while if we were to talk about the physical state of memory, we’d describe those features of a brain (or perhaps a computer) physically involved in the maintenance of a given memory. They emphasize that this distinction is important because two entities with different physical structures could, in principle, exhibit similar functions. We could encounter beings from another world, or advanced artificial intelligences, that are capable of thought or emotion, even if their physiology or structure were radically different from our own.

If we were to encounter such beings, how might we judge whether they were angry or sad or intended to buy a coffee? Presumably, we’d observe what they do, i.e., their functions, rather than pop open their brains or motherboards and start snooping around to see if they’re structured in the same way as our brains.

K&P propose that attributions of PC are sensitive to distinctive criteria that other mental state attributions are not sensitive to, and the functional/physical distinction plays a role in attributions of PC. In particular, they propose that “the process underlying ascriptions

of states that require phenomenal consciousness makes use of information about

physical constitution in a way that other mental ascriptions do not” (p. 71).

They propose to test this by presenting participants with agents that prompt participants to draw distinctions in mental state attributions consistent with their hypothesis. They opt for group agents. Why? They provide an extended rationale that leads up to this choice (pp. 71-73), including research showing that when people were asked to judge whether the statement “Some corporations want lower taxes,” on a scale from 1=Figurative to 7=Literal, the average score was 6.2, indicating a strong inclination towards judging such a statement to be meant literally (Arico, Fiala, & Nichols, 2011, p. 334, footnote 8). 

I have reservations about this from the very outset. It appears to be a reference to a pilot study mentioned in a footnote, which raises questions about how robust this result is. But setting that aside, I wonder what participants were thinking when they judged that “Some corporations want to lower taxes” was literally true rather than figuratively true. They give an example of a comparison item that was judged on average to be figurative: that “Einstein was an egghead,” though they don’t report the mean score for how literal participants judged items like this. Participants may have a higher threshold for judging something to be figurative rather than literal. People may, for instance, judge that a statement is literal when its intended meaning is clear and uncontroversial, and not necessarily because they are implying some implicit concept of mental state attribution (or some other implicit philosophical theory). 

That corporations “act” “as if” they want to lower taxes is hardly controversial, and that this is the case is not something people are likely to consider a matter of “opinion” in the sense of being an irresolvable issue of personal judgment or subjective taste. Whereas whether or not Einstein “was an egghead” carries negative normative connotations that have a subjective vibe to them. Maybe that could drive a difference in judgment. 

Or perhaps “egghead” is so obviously a kind of nonsense statement that it easily passes the bar for being figurative, while speaking of corporations as if they had thoughts and goals, even if figurative, is so natural that it flies under the inattentive participants’ radar, and they would, were the fact that they appeared to be implying a corporation literally has goals and motivations, would, on reflection, deny this. I don’t know, and maybe the literature addresses this somewhere, but either way, this finding, itself, struck me as fairly superficial.

The theoretical motivations behind the paper are a bit of a digression, but I want to draw attention to a general methodological concern with studies: often studies rely on past research, and if past findings are not on firm foundations, one may be building their own research program on a house of cards. The ongoing replication crisis in psychology strongly hints (I would go so far as to say that it confirms) that experimental psychology not only relies on poor methods but has relied on such methods for a very long time. The discipline has never truly established itself as the rigorous enterprise it should have been, in part because it’s never laid down firm foundations in one or more central guiding theories, as physics and biology have. Until psychologists grapple with the need for firmer theoretical foundations, we’ll continue to see wobbly towers of literature crash down from time to time.

K&P leverage this notion of group agents because it provides a familiar, everyday example that participants are more likely to relate to than the far-fetched thought experiments philosophers often indulge in. You know, the sort that feature robots and space pirates and sentient doorknobs. People often balk at these scenarios, and there may be good reason not to use them: they may be cognitively demanding, or distract people, or prompt a humorous response that undermines efforts to dispassionately prompt the appropriate cognitive states.

Second reason for employing group agents is that people already seem to attribute mental states to group agents despite the fact that group agents are physically very different from individuals. While people talk about what nations or corporations “intend” to do, or what they “think” about a given issue, they don’t have brains or nervous systems:

From the standpoint of physical constitution, group agents are radically different from individual human beings. In individual humans, decision-making is realized by neurons, synapses and firing rates. In a group agent, decision-making might be realized by committees, memos and emails. Clearly, the decision making of group agents can be realized by physical objects that have no parallel in individual humans. (p. 71)

Fair enough! So, what do K&P do with this?

2.2.1 K&P Study 1

First, K&P wanted to demonstrate that people appear to attribute mental states to group agents, but do not attribute mental states associated with PC. They did this by entering phrases indicative of non-phenomenal and phenomenal states into Google and seeing how many hits they got. Here’s what they found:

Figure 1: Knobe & Prinz (2008). Google search results for non-phenomenal and phenomenal states.

The article was published in 2008, so these results were obtained sometime that year or earlier. I did a quick check and things haven’t changed much since then:

Non-phenomenal

"Microsoft intends" 47,000

“Microsoft decides” 193,000

“Microsoft tries” 38,400

“Microsoft wants” 503,000

“Microsoft believes” 62,000

“Microsoft hopes” 216,000

“Microsoft loves” 92,600

“Microsoft hates” 92,200

Phenomenal

“Microsoft feels depressed” 4

“Microsoft experiences joy” 4

“Microsoft feels happy” 7

“Microsoft feels pain” 2

“Microsoft feels angry” 5

“Microsoft feels scared” 3

One of the amusing aspects of redoing this research is that almost all of the increased hits for the phenomenal states is a result of the publication of this study. Have a look:

The same pattern occurs for all of their other examples. I find this really amusing. While the addition of 4 search results does nothing to undermine their hypothesis, imagine their article had gone viral, become famous, and been cited many times. If it did, there might be a few hundred or even thousand hits for it by now. It would be a rare case in which the very act of publishing a study making a particular point would serve to appear to undermine that point (even if, of course, it doesn’t actually do so).

While I think this approach provides some information about the relative use of the phenomenal vs. non-phenomenal language, I have some concerns about this approach.

First, K&P employ what seems to be an a priori classification for nonphenomenal and phenomenal terms. We’re to simply grant that terms like “intends” and “decides” are non-phenomenal, but that “feels” and “experiences” aren’t. I’m not sure that we should grant this. It’s an open empirical question how, exactly, people think about these terms. I doubt people rigidly employ the former set to only refer to non-phenomenal states, and the latter to refer to phenomenal states, even if people did distinguish the two. Language is highly context-sensitive and vary in the way they’re used. It’s more likely that whether someone were drawing a verbal distinction between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states that this would be mediated more holistically, by how they were using terms in the broader context of the terms around them, the situation the person was in. Even so, if the data is consistent with their a priori classification, this would be more consistent with their hypothesis than at least many alternatives, anyway, so it would still be relevant and support their hypothesis. This concern, then, is not meant to completely undermine the way they’ve sat things up, but instead to plant a flag of potential concern.

Granted, this doesn’t mean the use of certain terms wouldn’t correlate with the non-PC/PC distinction, but it’s an open question how strong that correlation is, and it would at least introduce quite a bit of noise into whatever measures one might use. You might point to the fact that the numbers for non-phenomenal states are so much larger that this is unlikely to be a serious problem. And that may be true. However, you have to be careful when conducting a study: a study itself presents a particular context, and if that context prompts thinking or using language in ways that happen to coincide with nonstandard usage of terms, then you could skew results in ways that don’t reflect usage of those terms outside the study.

Another issue to observe with this study is that the non-phenomenal states consist of two words: Microsoft intends, decides, tries and so on, while the phenomenal states include a third term. Doing so adds greater specificity, which can greatly restrict the number of hits you get for these items. I’m not sure what the rationale behind this choice is, but if we add a third term to some of the non-phenomenal phrases (this is difficult, because most are grammatically disposed to require 4 or more terms to say something specific, because you’d need to add something like ‘to’), we get much fewer hits, while if we drop the third term from the phenomenal state phrases, we get many more hits. Let’s give this a try:

Non-phenomenal

“Microsoft loves customers” 3

“Microsoft loves customers” 1

Phenomenal

“Microsoft feels” 12,200

“Microsoft experiences” 25,700

See the problem? These hit results may simply be an artifact of using two-term searches for non-phenomenal phrases and three-term phrases for phenomenal phrases. Note one significant issue: “Microsoft Experiences” is a thing, so that’s likely inflating the hits on the latter. That is, if there’s a distinct proper noun that happens to be taking up a lot of the hits, then it’s not clear how many people are actually saying “Microsoft experiences…” in a sentence. Of course, both “feels” and “experiences” receive fewer hits than any of the non-phenomenal phrases, anyway, so overall K&P would probably be correct in suggesting people seem to use the terms they classify as non-phenomenal with reference to Microsoft more often than terms they classify as phenomenal.

They do acknowledge the following:

But now we face a problem. We know that people use certain English expressions more frequently than others, but we do not know precisely why they do this. It could be that the whole effect is due to some trivial difference like the number of words contained in each expression or the frequency with which people generally ascribe different types of states. (p. 74)

There are yet more problems with the particular way they approached this problem. As Kerr (2013) points out:

The way one couches one’s search terms is critical here. If one searches for ‘Microsoft was happy’ rather than ‘Microsoft feels happy’ one gets around 76,200 hits (at time and place of writing), presumably because the former is a much more natural way to convey a similar meaning. Even so, one cannot do this with all of Knobe and Prinz’s examples and it does seem that we are more comfortable attributing some mental states to groups and not others. ‘Microsoft envisions’ was not part of their study although my own search returns around 12,300 results so it seems ‘envisions’ might be closer to the non-phenomenal group than the phenomenal. (p. 6)

I agree with the general sentiment here. It does seem that people are more willing to attribute “non-phenomenal” mental states to Microsoft than “phenomenal” states, if we take the terms K&P use at face value and actually suppose they are or could be picking out such a distinction. Even so, at the very least, the specific contrast, of tens of thousands vs. virtually no hits, is likely an exaggeration of the degree of difference in attribution, and that may be due to differences in how people would be disposed to employ the terms in question, which may be more naturally conveyed in different grammatical forms than the ones K&P opted for.

2.2.2 K&P Study 2

In their second study, K&P gave participants a list of statements that attributed mental states to group agents, then asked participants to rate whether these statements sound “weird” or “natural” on a 7-point likert scale (1 = “sounds weird”, 7 = “sounds natural”). Here are some examples:

Non-phenomenal states

• Acme Corps. believes that its profit margin will soon increase.

• Acme Corps. wants to change its corporate image.

Phenomenal states

• Acme Corps. is now experiencing great joy.

• Acme Corps. is getting depressed.

Participants judged non-phenomenal states to sound more natural than phenomenal states, consistent with K&P’s expectation that people are willing to attribute non-phenomenal states ot group agents, but less disposed to attribute phenomenal states to group agents. In fact, as they point out, “even the most acceptable phenomenal state was still deemed less acceptable than the least acceptable non-phenomenal state,” illustrating that there was no overlap at all (p. 75). 

2.2.3 K&P Study 3

The goal of study 3 was to find out why people are less disposed to attribute phenomenal states to group agents. This study is a bit weird. They consider two possibilities: (1) phenomenal state attributes depend on how similar the target is to humans and (2) some other set of criteria (they’re not specific), such as an unwillingness to ascribe phenomenal states to a target agent that is made up of multiple agents. One would have thought they’d avoid bizarre scenarios, but they went with a very weird one here. Participants were given the following scenario:

Once there was a powerful sorceress. She came upon an ordinary chair and cast a spell on it that endowed it with a mind. The chair was still just made of wood, but because of the magic spell, it could now think complex thoughts and form elaborate plans. It would make detailed requests to the people around it, and if they didn’t do everything just as it wanted, it would start complaining. People used to call it the Enchanted Chair. (p. 76)

The chair is described only as having non-phenomenal mental states. K&P wondered whether people would nevertheless attribute phenomenal states to it, but not to Acme Corps. To test this, they gave participants the description of the Enchanted Chair and Acme Corps., then asked participants whether each could “feel happy or sad” using a 7-point scale. They found that participants were more likely to say that the chair could feel happy or sad (5.6/7) than Acme Corps. (1.8/7). Since people were willing to say the chair had “phenomenal” states but Acme Corps. could not, K&P take this to be evidence that “people do not simply refuse to ascribe phenomenal states to any agent that differs from human beings in its physical constitution. They must be making use of some more specific restriction that rules out group agents on independent grounds” (p. 76). 

I don’t know what to make of this. I’d like to see some qualitative studies that explored what people were thinking about when they answered these questions and why they answered the questions the way they did. It’s hard to pin down what may have been going on here.

2.2.4 K&P Study 4

In Study 4, K&P wanted to show that people would be willing to ascribe mental states to a group agent so long as doing so wouldn’t attribute a phenomenal state by indicating that it had experiences or feelings. To test for this, they presented participants pairs of statements to participants that varied the wording in such a way that one of the sentences would appear to attribute a phenomenal state and the other wouldn’t, while holding other features of the mental state constant, e.g., if K&P are correct, people should be willing to say that a group agent is “upset,” but not that it is feeling “upset.”  Participants were given the following two pairs of statements (they were given another similar pair as well):

1. Acme Corps. is feeling upset.

2. Acme Corps. is upset about the court’s recent ruling.

Once again, participants judged the degree to which these statements sounded weird or natural (1 = “sounds weird”, 7 = “sounds natural”). The average rating across participants indicates that they tended to think that (a) sounded much more weird (1.9) than (b) (5.3). 

Overall, K&P purport to have shown that participants are consistently disposed to attribute non-phenomenal states  but not phenomenal states to group agents, and that this difference is due to physical differences (rather than functional differences). This would suggest that nonphilosophers do have a concept of phenomenal consciousness (presumably one that roughly accords with the notion as it is understood by philosophers). 

What should we make of these results?  Wyrwa (2022) points out more serious problems with these studie. K&P’s results were not replicated in subsequent studies that corrected the methodological shortcomings of their original studies (p. 49). Wyrwa turns to Sytsma and Machery (2009), who argue that there is a significant confound in these results that raises doubts about whether the best explanation for K&P’s findings is that participants really do have a concept of phenomenal states. S&M propose that functional differences really are behind these differences in attribution. As Wyrwa puts it, Sytsma & Machery (2009) maintain that K&P failed to “control for the difference between behavior appropriate for group agents (e.g., hiring) and individuals (e.g., walking)” (p. 49, footnote 20). According to S&M:

People were unwilling to ascribe to corporations mental states that are typically associated with functional roles or behaviors that corporations are incapable of. It is possible, for example, that people feel that “Acme Corporation is now experiencing great joy” sounds weird because they do not readily imagine that a corporation, as a conglomeration of other agents, can have a state with the functional role that they associate with joy, including causing the behavioral cues associated with joy. That is, it might be that the sentence sounds weird to them because they feel that the corporation cannot do the things that normally indicate joy—cannot smile, or laugh, or even wag its tail. (p. 24)

S&M tested this by both replicating K&P’s original findings and testing a separate list of statements that either (a) only an individual agent could perform them or (b) group agents could also perform the action. Here are a couple examples of the latter:

Agent-only actions

• Acme Corporation has insomnia.

• Acme Corporation is eating a burrito with hot sauce.

Group-capable actions

• Acme Corporation is suing GenCorp.

• Acme Corporation is building a new factory.

Like K&P’s items, participants were asked to judge whether statements in each category were weird or natural. They found a similar pattern with both sets of items: agent-only actions were judged weird, just like “phenomenal” statements, while group-capable actions were judged to be natural, like “non-phenomenal” statements. Note that the individual-only actions are not actions that use the language researchers would plausibly associate with phenomenal states, and yet they likewise received low scores. It is possible, then, that what participants are really doing when attributing “phenomenal” and “non-phenomenal” states is distinguishing between the sorts of functions group agents could perform. If so, this would mean K&P’s findings do not support the conclusion that participants are employing a concept of phenomenal states. 

Of course, without additional questions exploring why participants answered one way or another (such data can itself be quantitative or qualitative), these results are not dispositive one way or another. But they highlight the presence of a potentially significant confound. S&M have more to say, so check out the rest of their article if you want to see more of these sorts of objections. 

S&M also highlight another problem with K&P’s studies. Recall that in Study 4, participants were given pairs of statements and asked to judge how weird each was:

• Acme Corps. is feeling upset.

• Acme Corps. is upset about the court’s recent ruling.

As S&M point out, results from this study could not be due to the previous confound because both states were ascribed to the same group agent (p. 29). However, S&M argue that Study 4 does not provide conclusive evidence that nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness because the pairs of aren’t a “minimal pair”:

The verbs in the no-feeling condition, but not in the feeling condition, are followed by a prepositional phrase. For instance, Knobe and Prinz compared the sentences ‘‘Acme Corp. is feeling upset’’ and ‘‘Acme Corp. is upset about the court’s recent ruling’’ (our emphasis). (p. 30)

If so, the difference in wording between the pairs of statements may account for K&P’s results, rather than K&P’s proposal that participants are employing a concept of PC that they attribute in some cases but not others. Once S&M tested this by swapping the prepositional phrase from the “feeling” condition to the condition without the use of the term “feeling,”which resulted in a failure to replicate K&P’s findings. In fact, they add that “not only did we fail to replicate Knobe and Prinz’s findings, our results actually reversed theirs” (p. 29). 

Simply put, K&P’s studies have not withstood subsequent critical scrutiny. While these studies should be lauded for their pioneering efforts to get a handle on whether nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness, and, perhaps more laudably, to assess what cognitive processes may drive various mental state attributions, any early foray into a new area of inquiry is bound to provide an incomplete picture, with subsequent findings often substantially modifying or overturning early findings. Such is the case with studies on whether nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness. While early studies may appear to provide some positive indication that this is the case, subsequent data has failed to support these conclusions. Nevertheless, while most studies over the past fifteen or so years suggest nonphilosophers don’t share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness as philosophers, Wyrwa maintains that these studies are likewise saddled with sufficient methodological problems that they, too, are inconclusive. I now turn to these criticisms:

3.0 So nonphilosophers don’t have a concept of phenomenal consciousness? Not so fast!

Most subsequent research has, at least according to the researchers who conducted it, generally supported the conclusion that nonphilosophers do not think about consciousness in the way philosophers do, and do not share the same notion of phenomenal properties. Following their critique of K&P, Sytsma and Machery (2010) began presenting evidence to the contrary:

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. (p. 299)

There may also be studies that support the notion that nonphilosophers have a concept of PC. If you find any additional studies that concluded that philosophers and nonphilosophers share the same concept of phenomenal consciousness, I will update this list to include those papers here. When there are multiple studies on the same subject, you will often find studies with conflicting conclusions: one should always beware appeals to one study. I would extend this to those who appeal to a set of studies that all reach similar conclusions. It often takes familiarity with the literature as a whole to reach informed conclusions about that particular body of research. 

For instance, there may be an equal number of studies both for and against a particular claim, yet it may be that one side of the literature emerged later and relied on better methods (or, alternatively, emerged later, was partisan, and appealed to worse methods). Thus, it would be hard to judge which side of a dispute is in a better position even if one were to appeal to the preponderance of studies for or against a given hypothesis: after all, it’s not merely a matter of quantity but quality: it matters what the studies actually show (a situation like this isn’t merely hypothetical, but is central to my own experience when reviewing the literature central to my dissertation; see note).¹ 

Although it would certainly be convenient for me if empirical data did support the conclusion that nonphilosophers don’t share the same concept of PC as philosophers, I am skeptical that studies have settled the matter. Wyrwa (2022) has much to say about the shortcomings of newer studies which purport to show nonphilosophers share philosophers’ concept of PC. 

First, it’s worth noting that Wyrwa likewise supports my sense that, overall, existing studies mostly favor the conclusion that nonphilosophers lack the same concept of PC as philosophers: 

According to the leading interpretation of these results, laypersons—people without academic knowledge about consciousness—do not notice the phenomenal aspect of consciousness. (p. 46)

Wyrwa also notes that S&M’s findings have withstood some methodological challenges and have been successfully replicated (see Cova et al., 2021; Sytsma & Machery, 2012; Sytsma & Ozdemir, 2019). 

However, much as I argue that the dominant paradigms in the psychology of metaethics rely on invalid measures, Wyrwa argues that we should not trust the results of the leading “No folk PC” view because these studies likewise suffer from a validity problem. Very roughly, in this context, validity refers to the degree to which a purported measure or test actually measures what it is intended to measure. A thermometer is a valid measure of the temperature to the extent that it actually measures the temperature. Just so, a study which purports to determine whether a nonphilosophers has a concept of phenomenal consciousness can only shed light on this question if the methods used to address this question…actually address the question. 

3.1 Operationalize this!

Essentially, Wyrwa argues that research on the question of whether nonphilosophers have a concept of PC has failed to provide an adequate operationalization of the concept of phenomenal consciousness. Wyrwa describes operationalization as “the ‘translation’ of theoretical constructs into something measurable by the research tool.” In this case, if we want to know whether nonphilosophers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness, we need to figure out what would allow us to determine whether people have this concept, some practical test, tool, or method, that would allow us to measure whether people have such a concept. Obviously, we won’t be able to make some device that works like a Geiger counter that we can just wave over people and detect the “has the PC concept” particles floating around them. We’d need some proxy or indirect method that would allow us to infer that people have or lack the concept. 

Here’s the issue: we don’t have Geiger counters, so what do we have?

Language.

As Wyrwa puts it:

We have to remember that language is the main—or the only—way to intersubjectively access PC. If we ask laypeople whether they would ascribe a mental state X to an agent, they fi nd out about X due to our use of language. Scholars of consciousness identify X as a phenomenal state but it is unclear if they name X in a manner that would allow laypeople to identify X as a phenomenal state. The question, then, can be phrased like this: how can we describe a particular kind of mental state to point toward its phenomenal character? What is certainly not enough is for a scholar to play an authority that judges which everyday terms and phrases are semantically closest to the philosophical jargon. This matter is to be tackled empirically, not from the armchair. (p. 53, emphasis mine)

Wyrwa is right. The degree to which any given term or phrase would serve as an indicator that people are employing an implicit concept is itself an empirical question that cannot easily be from the armchair, though one can set out with some set of a priori classifications, generate a set of predictions about how people would use various terms or phrases if they had a concept of PC, and see if findings are consistent with those predictions. If philosophers and nonphilosophers both consistently make the same kinds of attributions in the same kinds of cases, this may point to the two sharing the same concepts, though it may not. Such evidence would support one’s hypothesis (including the hypothesis that nonphilosophers have a concept of PC), but you’d have to be wary of confounds and alternative explanations, and it would hardly be definitive. There may be good reasons why philosophers and nonphilosophers speak the same way or respond to cases the same way in some narrow set of cases, even if they thought differently about them  A bottom-up approach that involves directly assessing how nonphilosophers use the relevant terms and phrases (e.g. “experiences,” “feels,” “sees”) may have more promising prospects. 

3.2 Between a set of particles arranged rock-wise and the property of hardness

Wyrwa (2022) describes a couple approaches one might take: “The first, (a), is to give participants a chance to notice that ‘the important part’ of what they read in the experiment is the phenomenal aspect of mental states” (p. 53). According to Wyrwa:

[...] the procedure for (a) is straightforward: we inform scholars that we want them to focus on the phenomenality of mental states that they will read about. We can also refresh their memory and include a short description of what PC is. (p. 53)

This doesn’t strike me as viable. In such cases, demand effects and other psychological factors may kick in, prompting participants to affirm that they “notice” these phenomenal states even if they don’t. However, another problem is that the very act of introducing people to philosophical terms and concepts may remove them from the pool of untrained nonphilosophers in the first place: how could we be sure that the very act of saying “hey, here are some categories and distinctions philosophers who specialize in studying this employ. Do you think the way these smart competent experts think about this issue?” 

Even if participants are unimpressed with the credentials and accomplishments of philosophers, introducing someone to certain ideas and concepts could cause them to develop those concepts or think in accord with the relevant distinctions, and to even begin using the language you provide to refer to those concepts. In other words, it could cause spontaneous theorizing, whereby participating in the study changes the way participants think to be more in line with the operationalizations, terms, and concepts presented in the study. Participants may lack introspective access to this, resulting in them mistakenly believing that thought in this way all along. 

This spontaneous theorizing is especially jeopardized when one foists the specific distinctions, categories, and descriptions analytic philosophers use onto participants. Further efforts to ensure that they comprehend the instructions and concepts could not only alter the way participants think, but specifically teach them to think like philosophers. If this occurs, it would defeat the whole purpose of the study. After all, the point of the study is to find out how nonphilosophers think. You can’t do that by giving them a crash course in philosophy, then asking them. Either the crash course will fail, in which case you won’t even know if your measures are valid, or it will succeed, in which case, congratulations, you’ve just trained a novice philosopher, whose responses are no longer reflective of the target population you wanted to study in the first place, nonphilosophers. 

This method would be absurdly challenging, and Wyrwa points to the risk of presenting participants with new concepts. How, exactly, do you prompt participants to reflect on whether they have the relevant concept if you (a) don’t know what terms or phrases they might use to refer to the concept and (b) the terms and phrases researchers use are all technical and philosophical terms that, could corrupt your participant pool by providing them with novel concepts that change how they think? Wyrwa provides an example:

Does the description “when you hear your favorite music, its melody makes you feel joy” suggest the phenomenality of conscious hearing experience or does it only point toward properties of the musical stimulus and the bodily reaction evoked (increased heart rate, foot-stomping)? (p. 53)

We simply don’t know. Wyrwa continues:

As of today, we have no data indicating which terms and phrases that are used to describe consciousness in the philosophy of consciousness are also used in everyday language to describe consciousness. This is a large pool of data that would need to be analyzed, but the main issue is how to point to the phenomenality without teaching about phenomenality. (p. 53)

This is one of the central problems researchers face: a kind of methodological Catch-22:

1. If you don’t ensure participants are interpreting questions as intended, you cannot be sure whether your measures are valid

2. If you do attempt to ensure participants are interpreting questions as intended, you risk altering how they think inducting them into thinking in terms of the concepts and distinctions of academic philosophers

Even if one could thread this methodological needle in principle, researchers have yet to do so in practice. This problem also generalizes to experimental philosophy as a whole: it may be exceptionally challenging to elicit the intuitions or judgments of nonphilosophers without the stimuli you’re using having a corrupting influence on your participant sample: you can’t find out what people who lack a quality think by giving them that quality and then finding out what they think.

The second is to canvas mental states philosophers claim involve phenomenal states and mental states that do not exhibit these properties, then assess whether philosophers and nonphilosophers attribute mental states across these conditions in the same (or at least very similar) way. Why so comprehensive? Wyrwa argues that:

it is not enough to show that laypeople attribute one or two kinds of mental states the way philosophers do, to make a claim about whether laypeople recognize a whole range of mental states based on their shared property (in this case: having phenomenal properties). We need to show that laypeople consistently attribute all relevant types of mental states in the way philosophers do. (p. 54)

For comparison, suppose you wanted to see if two groups identify the same set of objects as fruits. If you confirmed that Group 1 and Group 2 both agreed that apples and oranges are fruits, would this show that they employ the same concept of fruit? No. Maybe the groups would judge other objects differently. Maybe one group would consider all vegetables to be fruits, so they’d judge that asparagus and broccoli were fruits. Maybe their concept fruit is any small, round object, such as a marble. You wouldn’t know without asking them about a broader range of objects. To really know whether they employ the same concept of fruit, they’d have to agree both on what is a fruit and on what isn’t a fruit. Now, if you gave them a list of 100 items, and both classified the exact same 10 as fruits and 90 as non-fruits, that would be far better evidence that they are employing the same distinction than merely classifying apples and oranges as fruits.

Even this wouldn’t be good enough, though. That two groups categorize things in the same way does not mean that they do so for the same reason. Philosophers are drawn from the general human population. It’s possible that whatever distinctions they believe illustrate the phenomenal/non-phenomenal distinction are distinctions they are intuitively disposed to make for other (perhaps inscrutable) reasons, and they simply appropriate a disposition driven by some other cause for their theory, supposing that the distinction illustrates and is driven by an implicit notion of phenomenal consciousness, even if it isn’t. Maybe philosophers have engaged in a whole bunch of superfluous post hoc confabulation that has resulted in the construction of theories that purport to account for or explain their propensity to draw a distinction even if that isn’t the real reason why they (or nonphilosophers) are disposed to do so. This cannot be ruled out by armchair theorizing, and I suspect one could marshal a fairly good case that something like this plausibly could be going on.

Nevertheless, such evidence would at least be consistent with the hypothesis that philosophers and nonphilosophers share a concept of phenomenal consciousness, and would provide reasonably good evidence that they do share the same concept. While I’d remain skeptical, evidence that philosophers and nonphilosophers categorize mental states in the same way would be pretty good evidence that nonphilosophers have a concept of PC, even if it wouldn’t be definitive on its own…and that’s fine, one shouldn’t expect only a single finding like this to fully establish a given hypothesis.

I suspect achieving even this goal would be fairly challenging, though I think it would take quite a bit more work to devise additional findings that would corroborate these results and convincingly show that philosophers and nonphilosophers really are employing the same concept. Wyrwa believes that this second proposal is achievable though, going so far as to say that doing so, “while burdensome, is also quite simple to implement” (p. 55). Maybe so. I’m just not as confident in the probity of the results. Wyrwa addresses a number of criticisms of this approach, which I won’t address here.

Instead, I want to address a deeper concern: maybe there is no intelligible concept to operationalize in the first place. That is, maybe there is no concept of phenomenal consciousness. There may be instances where individuals or groups get tangled up in conceptual and linguistic knots that result in the use of terms and phrase that they may report, and genuinely believe, capture some distinctive concept, even if there is no particular concept to which those terms meaningfully refer. If so, it would make no sense to ask whether nonphilosophers share the same concept as philosophers, since there simply wouldn’t be a concept to share in the first place.

This may strike philosophers, at least, as one of the most ridiculous suggestions anyone could put forward. It may strike philosophers as very implausible that professional philosophers would be so confused as to not even know what they’re talking about. There is a great deal to say on this matter, not the least of which is that I don’t find it implausible at all, but I want to stress one point here: many philosophers toss arguments for and against various positions back and forth like Pokémon moves. They often take one or another conflicting positions to be “obvious,” and often think the arguments for or against that position are compelling. If they and their colleagues are so competent, and the arguments are so compelling, and their shared pool of concepts so intelligible, why do they still disagree with each other? 

There are a number of explanations why they would still disagree despite having access to the same arguments, sharing similar intuitions, and engaging with one another for decades, and, critically despite employing completely intelligible and well-understood concepts that they all have access to. Here’s one: their colleagues are simply incompetent. That is, they have all the tools and resources needed to reach the right conclusions, but consistently fail to do so anyway. That is exactly the kind of conclusion one might reach if the terms and concepts shared by academic philosophers are all intelligible, and they are using good methods to address philosophical questions: given how little consensus their is in philosophy, that would mean an enormous number of philosophers are completely wrong despite having all the tools and resources necessary to arrive at the correct conclusion.

Now, what I am suggesting, is that this lack of consensus isn’t a result of a whole bunch of philosophers using the right methods, having the right concepts, and reading the right books and articles, but somehow being completely wrong anyway, is that they are not using the right methods, do not have the right concepts, and are not reading the right books: the problem is endemic to the field, and is far more fundamental than one’s colleagues simply being a bunch of stubborn morons or are so riven by motivated reasoning and other biases that they are incapable of recognizing the truth even when it’s clear to others.

If I am correct, this could explain why at least some (if not many) philosophical disputes seem intransigent, and why philosophers take views that are often diametrically opposed. That they’re employing the wrong tools, or share some mistaken presuppositions, does not strike me as an especially insulting suggestion. If anything, I think the most plausible options on the table if you don’t suspect something like this is going on present a far less flattering picture of the field.

In this case, my concern is with the notion of phenomenal consciousness, and a related cluster of terms and phrases analytic philosophers employ: qualia, what-its-likeness, and so on. I am a proponent of qualia quietism, a view put forward by Mandik (2016). Roughly, I think that terms like “phenomenal consciousness,” “qualia,” “what-its-like,” and so on are technical terms invented by philosophers, that they are not meaningful, and that efforts to provide an account of their meaning have and always will fail because there isn’t anything substantive to communicate when using these terms.

According to Mandik:

The term ‘phenomenal’, as used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a technical term. I am aware of no non-technical English word or phrase that is accepted as its direct analogue. Unlike technical terms in maths and physics, which are introduced with explicit defi- nitions, ‘phenomenal’ has no such definition. What we find instead of an explicit definition are other technical terms treated as interchange- able synonyms. (p. 141)

Others have likewise identified such turns of phrase as technical terms, e.g., Owesen’s (2023) helpfully titled, “What-it’s-like talk is technical talk.” The opening lines of this article are no less direct:

It is common to characterise phenomenal consciousness as what it is like to be in a mental state. This paper argues that the ‘what-it’s-like’-phrase in this context has a technical meaning, i.e. a meaning for which the association to the relevant expression is peculiar to a theoretical community.

I’ve already written a blog post outlining my concerns with this terminology, so I won’t repeat all of that here. Instead, simply have a look at that post if you’re unfamiliar with my concerns. Very briefly, central to my concern is the total failure of proponents of these terms to communicate what they mean without appeal to a vicious chain of mutually interdefining terms (though this concern does not exhaust my objections to talk of phenomenal states, contrary to some misunderstandings that have arisen when I’ve discussed this problem). Mandik (2016) makes a similar point:

We have then, in place of an explicit definition of ‘phenomenal properties’, a circular chain of interchangeable technical terms — a chain with very few links, and little to relate those links to non- technical terminology. The circle, then, is vicious. I’m sceptical that any properties seem ‘phenomenal’ to anyone because this vicious circle gives me very little idea what seeming ‘phenomenal’ would be. (p. 142)

Wyrwa stresses the importance of operationalizing a concept one intends to measure. Here’s the problem: if it’s not clear what phenomenal consciousness means, or, if there is no non-circular way of expressing what it means, how on earth are we supposed to operationalize it? I think there is a simple answer to this question: we can’t. There simply isn’t a way to operationalize the concept, because there isn’t a meaningful concept to operationalize in the first place.

It is still possible that nonphilosophers are subject to a similar cluster of conceptual and linguistic errors as philosophers, though. That is, it could be that nonphilosophers share the same pseudoconcept of “phenomenal consciousness.” This may be worth studying, but it would be exceptionally difficult to study, and, in any case, I have my doubts that this is the case. 

Here’s what I think, I think academics were inducted into the same ways of thinking, studied the same material, were subjected to the same education, tend to speak and work in the same language, tend to interact with one another a lot, tend to be fairly insular, and tend to valorize the works of people who use these terms and purport to have these concepts. There are probably a host of other factors that causally intertwine their ways of speaking and thinking. Taken together, I think this results in a process of induction into shared ways of thinking and speaking that are distinctive to academic philosophers (and those working in related fields, e.g., cognitive science, or who read or discuss their work). I think this process of induction causes philosophers to develop idiosyncratic ways of speaking and thinking, and it is this process that has ultimately led to the promulgation and circulation of meaningless terms and pseudoconcepts. In short, I think studying and practicing a shared philosophical corpus causes those who study it to develop the same idiosyncratic and ultimately confused ways of thinking and speaking.

This hypothesis (I don’t have a name for it yet) may explain a great deal of observations: the insularity of academic philosophy, its lack of practical relevance, its abstractness, the intransigence of disputes within the field, and likely a host of other observations about the state of the field. And it could offer to do so with a fairly simple, underlying common cause behind all of these observations. That, at least, should count for something. Parsimony is a virtue.

Where does this leave us? At best, then, present empirical evidence about whether nonphilosophers share the same concept of phenomenal properties or qualia as philosophers remains an unresolved question pending future empirical inquiry. What we don’t have is a body of empirical literature that decisively supports Dominik’s claims: there simply is no good empirical evidence that nonphilosphers have a concept of phenomenal consciousness.

I, for one, endorse what others may regard as the “radical” suggestion that nonphilosophers don’t have a concept of phenomenal consciousness because there isn’t an intelligible concept to have in the first place. You don’t have to agree with me about this. You may even think this is the stupidest suggestion ever, and that there is obviously a meaningful concept of phenomenal consciousness on offer. Even if this is the case, though, there simply is no compelling body of literature that would support Dominik’s claims.

One interesting implication of my own diagnosis of the issue is that, if qualia quietism is correct, then not only do nonphilosophers lack a concept of PC, so, too, do philosophers, at least if we think intelligibility is a prerequisite for being a concept.

4.0 Stopping and asking

At long last, let us return to Dominik’s remarks. Dominik makes an interesting remark that I happen to agree with. Someone responds by stating:

The first six words are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I suspect if you stopped someone in a supermarket and asked them what they ‘mean by consciousness’ they wouldn’t reply ‘phenomenal properties’. The dialectic to establish what they DO mean might lead anywhere.

Dominik responds:

Obviously they wouldn't explicitly use the specific term to describe it, but they would talk about what's-it-like-ness in some way, e.g. what it feels like to taste coffee. No layperson thinks of consciousness in functional, third-person terms

I agree that most nonphilosophers probably wouldn’t use technical terms like “phenomenal state” to describe their experiences, but would they talk about “what’s-it-like-ness” in some way? This is an empirical hypothesis. It’s interesting that Dominik simply asserts that people would respond this way. If Dominik already had access to empirical data that supported this claim, why not provide it? It’s an interesting hypothesis, so why not go test it?

Again we have assertions about what people would say. Sometimes people tell me, when I criticize philosophers for making empirical claims but not showing any concern for the actual empirical data addressing those questions, that the philosophers in question aren’t really making empirical claims. It is hard to square such objections with what philosophers actually say. Dominik is clearly talking about what people would say as support for the contention that they think consciousness = phenomenal properties, suggesting that this judgment is based on a kind of armchair empirical hypothesis about what people would say when asked. This results in a fairly straightforward operationalization that places Dominik’s claims squarely in the realm of empirical inquiry.

It is exhausting to run into the constant insistence that philosophers aren’t really making empirical claims. Yes, they often are. They routinely make empirical claims but provide or appeal to little or no actual empirical evidence to support those claims. Speculation about what people would say is taken as sufficient to make inferences about what people think. If that sounds ridiculous and implausible to you, it’s because it is. 

If it seems so ridiculous and implausible that you are incredulous at the notion that serious academics would make claims like this, then consider reevaluating your standards about the methods (or lack thereof) of contemporary analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophy seems to instill in many of its practitioners the dubious notion that they have the extraordinary power to know what everyone in the world thinks and means without bothering to check. Note a couple caveats here: many analytic philosophers deal with issues that don’t touch so much on how nonphilosophers think, and others do care a great deal about empirical findings. Experimental philosophy arose out of analytic philosophy, and the field has always hosted empirically oriented philosophers. I do not have a problem with the entirety of analytic philosophy. I have a problem with certain dogmas, presumptions, and approaches that are common or at least influential enough to land on my radar. 

5.0 Folk functionalists?

Dominik also says that “No layperson thinks of consciousness in functional, third-person terms.” 

I agree that people probably don’t think of consciousness in functional, third-person terms, but I also don’t think that they think of consciousness in terms of phenomenal properties. It’s not as though it has to be one or the other: maybe they have no determinate position at all, or their views are so inchoate and underdeveloped they don’t really comport with any distinctive philosophical accounts.

Dominik’s phrasing almost makes it seem like nonphilosophers must implicitly subscribe to one or another of competing philosophical accounts. It’s almost as though philosophers have identified all the positions one can take, and the only question is which position is the “default” position prior to studying philosophy. Perhaps there is no default. Perhaps people don’t speak, think, or act in a way that implicitly comports with any particular philosophical theory at all. Why should they? Why presume we all come with philosophical default settings?

Dominik’s remarks are not unusual. Many philosophers seem to operate on the assumption that nonphilosophers have implicit views that accord with philosophical accounts. It’s strange.  Imagine if physicists went around presuming people had views on how to interpret quantum mechanics, or evolutionary biologists went around supposing that nonphilosophers had implicit beliefs about units of selection. This would be profoundly bizarre: in both instances, I am confident scientists would recognize that ordinary people usually don’t have views about these issues at all. 

Of course, “consciousness” is more familiar to us than quantum mechanics and natural selection, but that doesn’t mean that nonphilosophers implicitly appeal to and deploy philosophical theories about the nature of consciousness. I don’t need a theory about what pizzas are to enjoy pizza. Sure, we make judgments about mental states: we judge whether an action was intentional or not. We judge whether a person is morally responsible or not. And sure, these judgments are driven by some underlying causal factors that are clearly nonrandom. But whatever cognitive processes are operating outside of conscious awareness, why suppose that they map onto philosophical theories? 

Maybe those theories are a bunch of superfluous bullshit. Maybe those theories are true, but folk thought, language, and action is mistaken, just as it is with respect to the sciences: it’s not as though our implicit ways of talking about biology or physics track what the world is actually like. Or maybe much of what we’re doing when we engage in everyday discourse is driven by identifiable principles, but those principles are practical and functional and have very little to do with metaphysics. 

I don’t know, but neither do armchair philosophers. It’s an empirical question. If philosophers actually want to know how people think and speak, they should be using better methods than speculating about how the people they happen to have interacted with use English words.

I suspect the theories philosophers come up with often have little to do with how nonphilosophers think, and, in any case, how nonphilosophers think may very well be so influenced by variation in culture and language that there is no univocal “folk” view: there may be a variety of folk views. And as cultures mutually influence one another, people may become more similar: it could very well be that even if there were widely shared or even universal folk views on one or another philosophical issues, that those folk views are highly contingent. Had history gone differently, and had some different culture or language dominated the globe, people may have thought very differently. 

Yet philosophers often seem to treat human thought as though it isn’t sensitive to these sorts of considerations, as though human thought and intuition is universal or nearly universal in a way that transcends time, language, and culture. Maybe they would deny this, too, but if they were truly open to the potentially contingent nature of the way they happen to think, speak, and act, I suspect philosophers would be far more cautious about the efficacy of their intuitions. That they often aren’t at all, and seem to place great confidence in their philosophical intuitions, suggests that a sensitivity to the possibility that their philosophical dispositions may be highly sensitive to historical accident is largely absent from the way many philosophers think. 

For instance, many philosophers think moral realism “is obvious” and would insist it’s “intuitive.” Would it be if world history played out differently? I think many philosophers would suppose that it would: that a capacity for intuiting not only that there are stance-independent moral truths, but that we’d intuit the same moral truths, would reliably recur under a variety of counterfactual conditions.

But what if this simply isn’t true? What if the very notion of morality itself is a cultural invention, and that had the cultures in which morality not arose, the very concept of morality itself wouldn’t exist? Philosophers are welcome to scoff at this possibility, but I not only take it seriously, I think it’s probably true. Machery (2018) has argued that morality is a historical invention, and I’m inclined to agree. Stich (2018) has argued that both empirical and philosophical efforts to identify a distinctive moral domain have failed, and I agree. There are a number of studies and essays that explicitly support or could be leveraged in service of these claims (Berniūnas, 2014; 2020; Machery & Mallon, 2010; Parkinson et al., 2011; Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2012; 2014; Stich, 2019).

I see the very notion of morality itself as a culturally contingent concept that would no more recur under a variety of sufficiently distant counterfactuals than we’d expect to observe the emergence of chess or baseball. Sure, we’d have normative terms, concepts, language, and institutions similar to morality, but I don’t think we’d get the same thing. People don’t need distinctively moral concepts to experience and express empathy, to create normative systems, to judge one another’s character, to create functional norms and institutions, and so on. I see little reason to suppose that everyone, everywhere, thinks or speaks like a moral realist in part because I’m not even sure “moral” thinking is a sufficiently distinct form of judgment to carve out a distinctive place in our cognitive processes in the first place. 

There may very well be cultures whose languages and conception of normativity is sufficiently distinct from WEIRD notions of so-called “morality,” that there may very well exist identifiable populations around the world who think in demonstrably different ways from analytic philosophers about precisely those issues philosophers are often supremely confident involve some shared, universal “commonsense” or “folk” view (Berniūnas, 2020; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; cf. Doğruyol, Alper, & Yilmaz, 2019). Almost nobody is bothering to check, including philosophers. There is an inexcusable degree of methodological negligence in the consistent failure of philosophers whose positions and methods turn on presumptions about human psychology not bothering to check whether those presumptions are actually born out by the data, and, worse, many will scoff at or dismiss or simply ignore those of us who press the need for empirical data. The whole situation is ridiculous. History will not look kindly on the methodological intransigence of 20th century and early 21st century analytic philosophers.

I don’t need theories about consciousness to talk about experiences. Even if I did, why suppose that whatever patterns or principles governed my thinking and discourse about experiences touched on the kinds of concerns that occupy academic philosophers? When people are using mathematical language in everyday situations, must they all be implicit nominalists or platonists? I don’t think so. I think that everyday talk of numbers and shapes simply doesn’t speak to questions like this. Gill (2009) proposes a similar analogy, when suggesting that nonphilosophers may have no determinate metaethical positions:

There is no fact of the matter as to whether ordinary mathematic usage is better explained by a Platonist or anti-Platonist conception of number. The way people use numbers in everyday math simply does not contain answers to the questions that animate philosophy of mathematics. That is not to say that the question of what numbers are isn't philosophically important. But it's an ontological question on which conceptual analysis of ordinary arithmetic gains very limited purchase. (p. 218)

Maybe philosophers are operating under a far more broad and fundamental assumption about the nature of human psychology: that our language and judgments are driven by or at least accompanied by implicit theories, and those theories comport with or approximate the kinds of philosophical theories that analytic philosophers have come up with. Maybe that assumption is just wrong.

6.0 The folk philosophy fallacy

I want to conclude by introducing yet another fallacy into the fallacy canon. I have mixed feelings about all these “fallacies.” floating around. People misuse and overuse them and it’s annoying and undermines the quality of discussions and debates. Yet it’s also important to provide labels for recurring patterns, themes, and ideas. It reduces cognitive load and makes it easier to recall and identify instances of a given pattern. I can understand why people would hate the proliferation of fallacies, so maybe I should call what I’m talking about something else. If you have a good name for it I’d be open to changing it to whatever that proposed name is. For now, though, I’ll tentatively propose the folk philosophy fallacy. 

The folk philosophy fallacy is the mistake of presuming that nonphilosophers (i.e., the “folk”), implicitly or in some cases explicitly think, speak, or act in a way that fits or at least approximates one or another of the mainstream philosophical accounts described by academic philosophers.

Of course there may be cases where nonphilosophers do think, speak, or act in a way that comports with a particular philosophical account. Yet whether they do so is an empirical question and it is not something philosophers are entitled to presume without good arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, they routinely do just this. It’s almost as though philosophical theories are, for philosophers, simply refinements of and elaborations of how people already think, speak, and act. The philosopher’s job is to simply polish what was already there, lurking under the service. This may be the case for any given philosophical issue or even in general, but until and unless philosophers point to compelling evidence to support such claims, they should reconsider the degree to which they presume that the way they think mirrors the way everyone else thinks.

If philosophers really want to get a handle on how nonphilosophers think, they should stop employing top-down, a priori methods where they assume that the categories and distinctions central to mainstream analytic philosophy are reflected in the way nonphilosophers speak, think, and act. For whatever reason, experimental philosophers have been too quick to presume one can simply operationalize philosophical concepts as psychological constructs and identify them among laypeople. This presumption is, I suspect, probably wrong, and in any case I see little theoretical rationale for supposing it was true in the first place, much less any significant empirical justification. 

So what should experimental philosophers do? If their goal is to understand how people speak, think, and act, they should do exactly what psychologists should’ve done all along. First, they should stop thinking that their job is to pantomime the hard sciences by focusing primarily on experiments. Psychology, and by extension, experimental philosophy, aren’t mature enough philosophical enterprises for the degree of experimentation we see. For an excellent essay that argues for this (among other points), see Rozin (2001). Instead, they should focus on gathering lots of data about how people think. 

Rather than presupposing that the way everyone speaks and thinks can be neatly boxed and labeled using the terms that appear in philosophy textbooks, they should wipe the slate clean, and do their best to gather data in as theoretically neutral and non-presumptuous a way as possible. Rather than conducting studies that bake in the philosopher’s a priori assumptions about what is or isn’t relevant to or characteristic of the way people think, and rather than assuming that the sorts of “intuitions” that interest philosophers are at all relevant to everyday thought and language, experimental philosophers can observe real-world instances of how people speak, think, and act, gather descriptive data (rather than attempting to conduct studies or manipulate how people think), and gather qualitative data, which can provide richer insights into how people think that are less vulnerable to a prioristic assumptions. In short, philosophers should employ bottom up methods rather than top down methods.

Doing this would allow philosophers to adopt a more open-minded mindset about how people really do use language, speak, think, and act, rather than beginning inquiry with the presumption that, e.g., whether free will is compatible with determinism is remotely relevant to everyday judgments of praise, blame, and moral responsibility, or attributions of “free will” more generally. 

At the same time, it is imperative that philosophers interested in “commonsense” thinking or who appeal to empirical claims about how ordinary people think show much more interest in population variation due to differences in culture, language, religion, and other factors. I have stressed this point at length, and won’t repeat those same concerns here. See this article for a comprehensive discussion of the problem of what I call “generalizing from the armchair.” At present, most psychological research has been conducted primarily in Western and WEIRD populations, which are psychologically unrepresentative of most of the world’s population (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). However, most research is also conducted by people either from WEIRD cultures or working in universities in WEIRD nations. The abject lack of representation for most of the world’s populations is difficult to stress without looking at the numbers. As Henrich et al. (2010) reported back in 2010:

A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub- disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population. (p. 63)

If researchers themselves have cultural biases, they are bound to influence the way they conduct research: what hypotheses they choose, the languages studies are conducted in, the categories, terms, and distinctions they employ, and so on. The same is no less true of philosophers, who bring their entire Western analytic philosophical repertoire to bear whenever they design studies. Stepping outside their own cultural lens will be challenging, if not futile. Simply put, it should come as no surprise if a bunch of people who are members of the same communities (whether they grew up in them or began working at them later in life), share similar cultural backgrounds, work in the same language, read the same books, and interact to a disproportionate extent with members of a fairly small, insular community, should converge on similar ways of thinking. If, as I think abundant data suggests, culture plays a significant role in shaping how we think, it would be preposterous for philosophers to think that cultural biases couldn’t plausibly play an enormous role in how they design and interpret studies. Until and unless philosophers get a better grasp on cultural variation in human psychology, and how that influences our philosophical views, experimental philosophy will remain a narrow, parochial backwater that may tell us quite a lot about how American college students and online survey participants in the United States think, but it will tell us very little about how people in general think about traditionally philosophical issues.

Advances in experimental philosophy, and philosophy more generally, will require grappling with the origins of our philosophical “intuitions,” dispositions, categories, terms, and concepts. Why are philosophers disposed towards believing people have free will, or thinking moral realism is true, or thinking there’s a hard problem of consciousness? Philosophers may be content to suppose that their intuitions are more or less the same as everyone else’s, and that philosophy is a means of exploring a shared, universal set of philosophical concerns. But what if this simply isn’t true? What if many of the philosophical concerns that occupy philosophers are idiosyncratic, or culturally parochial? What if they are failing to grapple with philosophical problems that didn’t even occur to them? What if the particular topics that occupy philosophers, and their ways of framing and approaching those issues, are highly path-dependent, and that under a wide variety of plausible counterfactual conditions, academic philosophy would be concerned with radically different issues than it is, or employ radically different methods, or lead philosophers to radically different conclusions? 

Unless and until philosophers begin to take such concerns far more seriously, the field will make little progress. In short, progress in philosophy will require confronting the considerable challenge posed by developing a comprehensive understanding of human psychology. And this will require abandoning the presumption that everyone, everywhere, thinks like an analytic philosopher.

Notes

1. For example, I ended up focusing on the psychology of metaethics for my dissertation research. Early studies often found more variation and higher rates of realism than more recent studies. So does this literature support that most nonphilosophers are consistent moral realists, consistent moral antirealists, realist pluralists (realists about some issues, antirealists about others; they’d be realists because it only takes a little realism to be a realist), or something else? Until 2020, “mostly realist pluralists” would be the most surface-level interpretation of much of the literature. But since the publication of studies with better methods, studies written by authors who specifically canvassed previous research, identified the shortcomings in that research, then devised new studies that sought to correct for these shortcomings, the picture is a lot less clear: more recent studies such as Beebe (2015), Davis (2021), and Wright (2018), and Pölzler and Wright (2020a; 2020b), found far higher rates of antirealism. 

Is this just a clash of two equally well-positioned bodies of literature? Absolutely not. These later studies were devised with the explicit goal of correcting for methodological shortcomings in the previous studies. Beebe noted the absence of noncognitivism options, included them, and found that once they were offered they were very common (they were the most popular choice for some moral issues). Beebe (2020) has subsequently argued for folk relativism. Davis likewise noted a significant lack of response options for possible metaethical positions. Once included, Davis, too, found higher rates of antirealism. Pölzler (2018), and Pölzler and Wright (2020a; 2020b) identified numerous methodological problems with previous research and did their best to correct for it. 

My own research, as well as David Moss’s research and our collaborations (Bush & Moss, 2020) provide additional empirical and theoretical support for the identification of methodological shortcomings in previous research. The point here is that newer research is better, and it has generally trended, with  exceptions towards the possibility that antirealist thinking may be prevalent in ordinary thought (see e.g., Zijlstra, 2023, though see also my criticisms of this study in Bush, 2023, specifically section S3.9 in the Supplement to Chapter 3, in the Supplements on page 431).

Even if using a dozen or more measures, one found participants gave a realist-leaning response to one of them, it would be a bit dubious to take this as evidence that the person “is a realist.” It would be even more questionable to deploy such a result to insist that realism is “the” commonsense view: such data would, at best, show significant evidence of both realist and antirealist thinking among ordinary people, and it would be extremely misleading to interpret findings like this as evidence that antirealist views towards moral issues are “counterintuitive.” Employing measures in such a categorical way would also be a poor way to interpret findings. If you give someone a 50-item Likert scale that consisted of statements affirming the existence of God, with response options ranging from 1 = Strongly disagree to 7 = Strongly agree, if a participant’s mean score was 2.3 out of 7, and they selected items indicating disbelief in God for 47 out of the 50 items, and 3 affirming God’s existence, would you conclude that the participant “believes in God” by using the standard that “If even a single item ever crosses the midpoint, the person believes in God”? No. That would be absurd. 

One reason for employing so many items is to buffer against variation in participant interpretation, error, and other factors. Setting categorical standards like that in empirical research of this kind isn’t a sensible way to approach the data. Nevertheless, Dominik’s remarks (I believe on YouTube) have hinted that Dominik’s view is that this is how we should interpret data on whether nonphilosophers are moral realists. It’s not a reasonable approach and I doubt many researchers would, either initially or on reflection, endorse such a crude way of interpreting data. Nevertheless, I suspect philosophers unsympathetic to antirealism would interpret evidence in this way, even if it is a tendentious and poor reading of the literature.

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