Late morning. Earlier Kim, Carol and you had
breakfast at Scrambler Marie’s near Polaris after dropping the boys off. Kim’s
treat. Tuesday you got lunch at Liberty Tavern in Powell. Paul was home by eleven
from early work. He has almost all the stick construction completed in the
basement. You were both surprised and impressed. There will be a bath with a
shower, laundry room, storage room, bedroom with a walk in closet, media room,
gymnastic/weight room, kitchen with stove, refrigerator, cupboards, sink dishwasher,
island, etc. Next comes the plumbing and wiring. You assume this is for his
parents if and when they wish to settle in old age. Otherwise, the finished rooms
will be used by the family and/or longer staying family or guests. - Amorella
1150
hours. It is good to see the boys. What a difference. Both are indeed boys,
human beings, as it were – individuals with developing personalities.
You stopped by and saw Aunt Patsy before
heading home. She was in good spirits though mostly bedridden. (She was sitting
up in bed and eating lunch when you arrived. You gave her the birthday card and
chatted for fifteen minutes or so. She wanted to talk about the election – not too
happy with Trump or Clinton [understatement]. – Amorella
28
April 2016
1701
hours. First, a round up of yesterday. She spoke a bit about Owen and the kindergarten
musical program also – exchanging pleasantries. We told her we would probably
be back up next week and we would stop in. She is very frail and says it is not
nice being 95 years old. I think she has an excellent point. If I get to the
point where I feel I am a burden on society I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s a
sad state for a human being to be into – she has her mind, she is conscious of
her health. To say she has no right to be somewhat depressed is wrong. She
does.
I
found the below in my mailbox shortly after noon. Then we ran some errands,
Carol walked at the community center and we had lunch at Piada’s Street
Italian, stopped at Kroger’s then home.
** **
Edge:
Conversation: Mind
“When
Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology”
A Conversation between
Joshua Knobe, Daniel Kahneman
DANIEL
KAHNEMAN: We're at the
nub of the question. You come from philosophy, so there are certain things that
are of interest to you. You want to convey two things at once: that the
question is exciting, and that you have something new to say about it. It is
true that I, as a psychologist, would come to the same question and conclude
that it's an impossible question. Those are two impossible questions, and I
certainly would not expect people to answer them in any way that is coherent.
My
first assumption, coming to it as a psychologist, is that there is no
coherence. You agree with me that there is no coherence. What makes it exciting
from the point of view of philosophy is that there is no coherence. Whereas, as
a psychologist, I take it for granted that there is no coherence, so it's less
exciting. That could be one of the differences.
JOSHUA
KNOBE: That's
really helpful. The thing we showed is not just that it is incoherent but along
which dimension it is incoherent. It seems like there was evidence already that
there's something pulling us towards one side and something pulling us to the
other side, and we want to know which thing is pulling us towards one side or
the other. We suggested that it's this difference between abstract thinking and
concrete thinking....
JOSHUA
KNOBE is an experimental philosopher and professor of philosophy and cognitive
science at Yale University.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the
recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002), and the Presidential Medal of
Freedom (2013). He is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus,
Princeton, and author of Thinking Fast
and Slow.
KAHNEMAN: Let's
begin with an obvious question. What is experimental philosophy?
KNOBE: Experimental
philosophy is this relatively new field at the border of philosophy and
psychology. It's a group of people who are doing experiments of much the same
kind you would see in psychology, but are informed by the much older
intellectual tradition of philosophy. It can be seen as analogous, on a certain
level, to some of the work that you've done at the border of psychology and
economics, which uses the normal tools of psychological experiment to
illuminate issues that would be of interest to economists.
Experimental
philosophy is a field that uses the normal approaches to running psychological
experiments to run experiments that are in some ways informed by these
intellectual frameworks that come out of the world of philosophy.
KAHNEMAN: I
read the review that you were the senior author of in Annual
Review of Psychology in
which you dealt with four topics. It was all very summarized, and I don't
pretend that I understood it all. I was struck by the fact that you run
psychological experiments and you explain the results. There is something that
sounds like a psychological theory, and yet, there was a characteristic
difference, which I was trying to get my fingers on.
There
is a difference between the kinds of explanations that you guys seem to produce
and the kinds of explanations that I would produce. I found myself with an
alternative view of every one of the four topics. I was wondering if we could
go into depth on that. Is there a difference? Is there a constraint? Is it
because you are philosophers? Do you do things differently when you do
psychology?
KNOBE:
I doubt it would be helpful to think about it at that
abstract level. It would be more helpful to think about one of the individual
things.
KAHNEMAN:
I'll give you two examples of the kind of thing
that made me curious. The first one is on your earlier work on the role of
moral reasoning in intentionality. This is something we talked about years
ago. There seems to be an alternative story, which is not the one you discuss.
First, describe the phenomenon, because otherwise nobody will know what we're
talking about.
KNOBE:
The key question at first might seem
straightforward: How do people understand whether you do something
intentionally or unintentionally—on purpose or not on purpose? At first it
might seem like this question doesn't have anything to do with morality; it
just has to do with what someone's mental states are, and how those states are
related to people's actions. The surprising result at which we arrived is
that people's moral judgments—judgments about whether something is morally good
or morally bad—seem to impact their judgments about whether you did it
intentionally.
An
example that a lot of people may have already heard of involves the vice
president and the chairman of the board. The vice president comes to the
chairman of the board and says, "We've got this new policy; it's going to
make huge amounts of money for our company, but it's also going to harm the
environment." The chairman of the board says, "Look, I don't care at
all about that. All I care about is making as much money as possible. Let's
implement the policy." They implement the policy, and sure enough, it ends
up harming the environment. Then participants are asked if the chairman of the
board harmed the environment intentionally. Most people say yes. If you ask
them why, they say that he knew he was going to harm the environment and he did
it anyway. It's just a matter of which mental state he had.
We
had the thought that maybe something more is going on here. In particular,
maybe what's going on is that people say it's intentional because they think
harming the environment is bad. You can see that there might be something to
if you just take the word "harm" and switch it to "help,"
but you leave everything else the same.
Suppose
the chairman of the board gets this visit from the vice president, and the vice
president says, "We've got this new policy; it's going to make huge
amounts of money for our company, and it's also going to help the
environment." The chairman of the board says, "Look, I know it's
going to help the environment, but I don't care at all about that. All I care
about is making as much money as possible." So they implement the policy,
and sure enough, it helps the environment. In that case, participants
overwhelmingly say that he helped the environment unintentionally. The only
difference is between harm and help. Somehow, it seems like the difference
between being morally bad and morally good is affecting your intuition about
whether he did it intentionally or not.
KAHNEMAN:
Can you give a sense of how you would explain that?
KNOBE:
My explanation draws on some of your early work
from the '80s, from the idea of norm theory. The idea is to consider the actual
state that the chairman was in. His actual state was that he just didn't care
at all. He was completely indifferent. You can think of that state as being the
midpoint on a continuum.
On
one hand, you can imagine someone who was trying as hard as he could to produce
a goal, either to harm the environment or to help the environment. On the other
hand, you can imagine someone who was trying as hard as he could to not do
it, to avoid harming or helping the environment, but ended up harming or
helping the environment nonetheless. The actual state is intermediate.
If we
imagine what it is to do something intentionally, broadly speaking, it's to be
pretty far on the goal-seeking end of the continuum. The further you are that
way, the more intentional it is. The further you are in the opposite direction,
the more unintentional. When you see someone in a particular state, what do you
compare that to? In the case where he harms the environment, the first thing
you compare it to is the state of someone who's trying to avoid harming the
environment. When you compare it to that, he's pretty willing to harm the
environment.
Now,
in the case where he helps the environment, the first counterfactual you think
of is the counterfactual in which he's actively trying to help the environment.
Compared to that, he seems pretty not into helping the environment. This
intermediate position—the position that's neither here nor there—in one case is
seen as surprisingly willing, compared to what you would counterfactually
consider that case, and in the other case, surprisingly reluctant, compared to
the counterfactual that you would consider in that case. That's the explanation
that I offer.
KAHNEMAN:
By the way, the explanation I thought wasn't
mentioned in the Annual Review
piece. What you are saying is that moral judgment
preexists in some way and infuses regular judgment as if those were two
different categories. My sense was that the concept of norm is quite
interesting because it does both things: it speaks of normal and it speaks of
normative. Now we're linking to what you're saying. It is more abnormal to do
bad things than to do good things.
KNOBE:
That's exactly right. It's a mistake to think about
it in the way that some researchers maybe have thought about it, that the way the
human mind works is that there's this gap between our moral judgments and our
factual judgments, and then there's a causal relation between them. Rather,
we have a way of thinking about the world that doesn't involve that kind of
distinction between prescriptive and statistical.
One
way we've tried to test this is by using this notion of the normal that you
addressed. In a series of studies, we asked people about the normal amount of
various things. What's the normal amount of TV to watch in a day? What's the normal
amount of drinks for a fraternity member to have on a weekend? What's the
normal amount of students in a middle school to be bullied? Then for each of
those things, we asked another group of people what the average amount of those
things is. What's the average amount of TV to watch in a day? What's the
average amount of drinks for a fraternity member to have on a weekend? Then we
asked a third group what the ideal was. What's the ideal amount of TV to watch
in a day? What's the ideal amount of drinks to have on a weekend?
Across
all of these different items, people tend to think that the normal is
intermediate between the average and the ideal. Exactly like you suggested. It
seems like we have this notion of the normal that's not the notion of the average,
or the notion of the ideal; it's a mixture.
KAHNEMAN:
I agree. I've been interested in where that notion
of the normal comes from. But the way that you talk about it struck me as
interesting. You talk about it as if there were an expectation that pure
cognitive judgment would be independent of moral judgment, and lo and behold,
it's not independent. But why have that expectation? If we are agreeing that
it's all about normality, which comes from relative frequency—some of it is
abnormal because it's immoral, and some of it is abnormal just because it's
rare, but there is no difference. So here you can have the whole theory that
doesn't mention morality, except at the very end—the mere fact that immorality
is abnormal. That's not quite the way you write it up. I'm trying to
distinguish what you do from the kind of psychology that I do.
KNOBE:
I feel like our disagreement seems like a funny one
in that it seems like we both agree about what the right answer is, but we're
just disagreeing about whether it's surprising. Maybe the sense in which we
found it surprising is against the background of a certain view that a lot of
people have about how the mind works.
A lot
of people have this view that there's a certain part of the mind in charge of
figuring out how things work, and then there are other representations or
cognitive processes in charge of thinking about how things ought to
be. Then there are causal
relations between those. That's what we really wanted to attack. It seems as
though the way the human mind works is that there's no clear distinction
between the processes in charge of figuring out how things are and
the processes of thinking about how they ought to be. There are these
processes that are a hybrid of those, a mix or hodgepodge.
KAHNEMAN:
Now it's becoming clearer what's happening here. There
are two things. One is that your question and your basic concepts are borrowed
from philosophy. You are talking about moral judgments infusing cognition.
Basically, there is a psychological assumption, a mechanism, where moral
judgment and cognitive judgment are still separate, but you're showing that
they merge. Whereas, as a psychologist, I would immediately question why
you assume that they are separate in the first place. What makes your
question interesting is the philosophical background that distinguishes sharply
between moral judgment—between is and ought.
KNOBE:
You're right that it's against the backdrop of this
assumption—which we both think is a mistaken assumption—that this result
becomes especially interesting. Even though I completely agree with you about
what the right answer is, a lot of researchers in the field of theory of mind—people
who are just trying to understand how people ordinarily ascribe mental states—have
this view that a good way to understand how theory of mind works, how people
ordinarily make sense of each other's minds, is that it's something like a
scientific theory.
KAHNEMAN:
Let's look at another example. Can you describe the
line of research on free will and the story that you tell about free will?
KNOBE:
Another fundamental question that philosophers
have often wondered about is about the relationship between free will and
determinism. Suppose that everything we're doing is causally determined. Everything
we do is caused by our own mental states, which are in turn caused by previous
things back to some facts about our genes and our environment. Could we still
be free? Philosophers have been wondering about this for thousands of
years.
Incompatibilism
says freedom and determinism are incompatible. If everything you do is causally
determined, nothing you do could possibly be done of your free will.
Compatibilism,
this other view, says that these two things are compatible with each other. If
everything you do is completely determined, say by your genes and your
environment, as long as it was determined in the right way, you could still be
doing something that was completely free.
How
can this be explained? It seems, intuitively, an obvious hypothesis is that
there are different things within our own minds that are pulling us in
different directions, drawing us towards incompatibilism, but also toward
compatibilism.
Maybe
there's a difference between what happens when you think about the question
in the abstract and when you think about the question in the concrete. If
in the abstract you're thinking, here's the idea of determinism, here's the
idea of freedom, are they compatible? Then people think no. But if you think of
one individual person who did something morally bad, even if you think that
person is completely determined, you're still going to be drawn to the idea
that that person is morally responsible for what he did.
In a
series of studies, we tried to vary this dimension of abstractness versus
concreteness. We told people about a universe in which everything was
completely determined by things that happened before. In the abstract
condition, we asked if anyone in this universe could ever be morally
responsible for anything they did. People overwhelmingly tended to say no one
could be morally responsible for anything.
In
the concrete condition, we told them to imagine one person who does one morally
bad thing in this universe and asked if that person was morally responsible for
what he did. Then people tended to say yes,
which is obviously a contradiction with the claim that no one can ever be
morally responsible.
Our
thought is that it's the tension between these two psychological processes—the
processes involved in this abstract cognition and the concrete cognition—that
are giving rise to the problem of free will.
KAHNEMAN:
Here is a different psychological take on that. When
you ask people a question, they don't necessarily answer the question that you
ask them. They could very well be answering a neighboring question. When
you're asking about the question of free will, about a concrete example such as
a crime, people might answer it in terms of how angry they feel: whether they
blame the person, if they're angry with the person, if they would like to harm
the person.
This
is a question that perhaps somebody has never gotten before or has really not
thought deeply about, so there is no obvious answer. Some of us think that when
you ask people a difficult question, they don't answer it, they answer a
different question that's simpler. On the issue of free will, when it is an
emotional issue, that is, when you're angry, when there is a crime being
committed—what you call emotional salience—there is an alternative view because
the answer to the question of whether a person is free or responsible for
his/her actions is determined because you're angry. You would not be angry if
that person were not responsible. You infer that you think that person is
responsible from the fact that you are angry.
KNOBE:
First of all, I don't think that that is the right
hypothesis, and I'll provide some evidence for that in a second. Suppose we
assume that that is the right hypothesis—attribute substitution. Do you think
this attribute substitution could plug into the basic story that I was offering
originally? I was asking why this problem has been a problem for thousands of
years, and suggesting that people are torn in these different directions
depending on whether they think abstractly or concretely.
If
you now think the reason they give different answers in the abstract and the
concrete is because of attribute substitution, do you think that could plug
into this basic picture that the reason we've been worried about this so long
and can't agree about it is because, in the concrete, we use this heuristic?
KAHNEMAN:
This is not the way that you explain it. We'll talk
about the details in a minute, but it is very much the same as the issue that
we discussed a few minutes ago.
The
concepts that you're bringing in are the concepts of philosophy. You're
bringing them unchanged, with their baggage. Then, you find, you observe, you
discover, that there is some relationship between these concepts that shouldn't
be there, or that there is a variable that should not be influential but is. I
do not recall that there is the possibility anywhere that people are not
answering the question that you ask them. If you did introduce that
possibility, wouldn't it make the philosophy look less interesting?
KNOBE:
I think it wouldn't. But I also think that that
possibility is false. The alternative that you suggest is that maybe people are
being driven by anger. They have this emotional reaction, and instead of
answering the question that's being posed—did he have free will?—they're
answering this other question, is this outrageous?
There
are two pieces of evidence against that idea that anger plays any role in it.
One
is if you look at participants who have a psychological deficit, a deficit in
emotional reaction due to frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. These are people who
experience less emotion than you or I would, so they have this deficit in the
capacity for emotional response. If it was due to emotion, you'd expect the
effect that I described to be moderated by this difference between FTD patients
and us.
But
in fact, FTD patients showed just as much the tendency to say that these people
are morally responsible as participants without FTD, indicating that whatever
it is that makes us do it, it's not the fact that we feel anger at this.
KAHNEMAN:
That brings back norm theory—normality and
abnormality. When something truly unusual happens, we look for responsibility.
There is more to explain when the event is extreme. When the event is extreme,
the explanation that attributes causal efficacy to the agent is much more
attractive when the action you're explaining is unusual and abnormal than when
it is normal and customary. I was toying with two psychological
interpretations.
KNOBE:
That second one was possible, too, but tragically,
I think it's also false. Subsequent studies have checked what happens when
people are asked about someone who just decides to go jogging. Imagine you're
in a completely deterministic universe, and you decide to go for a jog. Did you
do that of your own free will? This is the least abnormal action.
People
again tend to say you do that of your own free will. It feels like it's
something about concreteness, per se, not about immoral actions or emotion.
It's nothing about the abstract question, but rather thinking about a real
individual human being doing something.
KAHNEMAN:
I can see that. Let me think about it for moment.
Here is another way in which a psychological
analysis might go. When I ask if a person is free, there are so many
substitutes to that question.
The
first and most obvious substitute is: Does that person feel free?
It's a very different question, and the answer to it is much less interesting.
It is true that that interpretation doesn't arise when you are asking the
question in the abstract.
When
you're asking about concrete actions, that interpretation of the original question—is
the person free?—in terms of does the person feel free,
is quite an attractive interpretation. But that could be false as well.
KNOBE:
That's really helpful. I don't know if you'll think
that this new data point helps to illuminate the issue, but there's been a nice
series of studies on this topic by Dylan Murray and Eddy Nahmias. They took the
cases that we used and asked people a different question.
They
asked: Does the action that the person performed depend in any way on what the
person wanted, thought, or decided? You might think that if everything is
deterministic, it still does depend on that. It depends on that because it goes
in a deterministic chain through that very thing.
When
people are given the abstract question—in this whole universe, does the
thing you do depend on your beliefs, desires, and values?—people say no.
In
the concrete case, they tend to say yes. I have the sense that
whatever difference is obtained between the abstract and the concrete could be
due to attribute substitution of some kind, but not to thinking that this
person is really asking whether the person feels free.
KAHNEMAN:
Attribute substitution is a psychologically richer
concept than this. There are those experiments, which ask first how many dates
you had last month, then they ask how happy you are. There is a very high
correlation between the number of dates and how happy you are. When you ask the
questions in reverse order, you don't find that correlation.
Now,
this clearly indicates that people use their happiness and the romantic feel
that you have just evoked to answer the question of how happy you are in
general. They're not confused. They know the difference between happy in
general and happy in the romantic area. They know the difference, but they
answer one question in terms of the other without being aware of the substitution.
It's not that they're conceptually confused.
Some
of the questions that you ask naturally evoke alternative questions,
neighboring questions. This is more likely to happen, clearly, in the concrete
case than in the abstract case.
Again,
what strikes me is that you don't start from the psychology of it. What I'm
trying to get at is that you are starting from concepts that are drawn from
philosophy, and you're using these concepts in a discourse about the psychology
of intuitions. There seems to be a characteristic difference—and this is what
I'm trying to draw out of you—between this way of thinking about experimental
philosophy and the approach that is purely psychological.
If
you started as a psychologist, you would look at these complicated, abstract
questions, and you could say or at least what I'm inclined to say, that these
questions are truly impossible; people must be doing something to make them
intelligible to themselves to answer it. Then let's try to figure out what is
the nearest that we can come to a coherent description of how people answer
this question in this context and that question in the other context. That
strikes me as a natural way for a psychologist to go at your questions, and it
is not what you're doing. That's what makes me curious. What is the difference
in the way that we approach it?
KNOBE:
It's an interesting question. In general, if you
look at the processes that we invoke in order to explain these questions, there
are psychological processes of a general sort. It's not that we are tending to
invoke special philosophical processes. Our discussion that we just had about
the case of intentional action had that character. What we were suggesting
is that the process that explains this result is just a general fact about how
people understand norms, and how people compare what actually happened to what's normal.
Where
the two of us parted ways is in thinking about what's exciting about that or
what's interesting about it. I was thinking the fact that people use this
process—the process that we both think that people use—is exciting or
interesting against the backdrop of this much larger philosophical framework.
It didn't seem like we disagreed about why people show this pattern of
responses. I felt—in a way that maybe you didn't—that we can think about what's
interesting about that by thinking about the fact that people use this psychological
process against the backdrop of this philosophical framework that a lot of
people have.
KAHNEMAN:
We're at the nub of the question. You come from
philosophy, so there are certain things that are of interest to you.
You
want to convey two things at once: that the question is exciting, and that you
have something new to say about it.
It is
true that I, as a psychologist, would come to the same question and conclude
that it's an impossible question.
Those
are two impossible questions, and I certainly would not expect people to answer
them in any way that is coherent.
My
first assumption, coming to it as a psychologist, is that there is no
coherence. You agree with me that there is no coherence.
What
makes it exciting from the point of view of philosophy is that there is no
coherence. Whereas, as a psychologist, I take it for granted that there is
no coherence, so it's less exciting. That could be one of the differences.
KNOBE:
That's really helpful. The thing we showed is not
just that it is incoherent but along which dimension it is incoherent. It seems
like there was evidence already that there's something pulling us towards one
side and something pulling us to the other side, and we want to know which
thing is pulling us towards one side or the other.
We
suggested that it's this difference between abstract thinking and concrete
thinking. I agree that part of the reason why you might care about that is
because you might care about the question of whether human beings have free
will.
If
you find yourself untroubled by those questions, so you think free will...
KAHNEMAN:
I could be deeply troubled by
this question if I could imagine an answer to it.
There
is a set of questions to which I can imagine an answer. When do people feel
free? That's a very exciting psychological question.
When
do people think that other people are free?
That's
a different question, also quite exciting. But those are psychological
questions, and I would not assume any coherence.
KNOBE:
You're saying, of course people's own intuitions
contradict each other, against a certain backdrop. Why would you have thought
otherwise?
KAHNEMAN:
If you're for a philosopher, you would never say,
of course they contradict each other.
KNOBE:
It's interesting that you bring up that specific
point. I find that there is a real tradition within philosophy of thinking
that there are these tensions that we seem to experience, this puzzlement, but
that if we could just see the situation clearly, if we could understand clearly
what's going on, then we'd see that everything coheres beautifully with
everything else.
KAHNEMAN:
Absolutely.
KNOBE:
Then the idea that it's clarity
that
we'll get out of this is the idea that we are fighting against. In this case,
it seems like the more you understand clearly what's going on, the more you see
how genuinely puzzling it is that there is something pulling in one direction
and something else pulling in another direction, and it's not as though
those two things can be reconciled.
KAHNEMAN:
This is truly an interesting point. The basic
assumption is that there is some underlying coherence, and the task of the philosopher
is to discover it. That really is the theme of conversation, if you think about
it.
As a
psychologist, I just don't make that assumption. It's obvious to me, in
every context including statistical intuitions, moral intuitions, physical
intuitions, they're not coherent.
We have all sorts of intuitions and if you
try to connect them logically, they're not consistent. It's interesting, but
it's a very general effect.
KNOBE:
I wonder if you would accept the following way of
thinking about it. When people are thinking about these questions
psychologically, I almost feel like there are these two different forces at
work in their way of thinking about them.
One
is just the data. People are trying to make sense of the data. As they look at the data, they tend to be drawn
towards this view that best fits with the data that there is something
incoherent within people.
To
take our other example, there's no clear division between people's
prescriptive judgments and their descriptive judgments; these things are
mixed in some way.
The
reason they're drawn to those views is because that's the best explanation of
the available evidence.
There's
this other force that plays a role in people's way of thinking about these
questions, which isn't a force specifically among people in philosophy
departments or psychology departments; it's something that takes hold of
people when they start to think at a more abstract level about how this stuff
works.
When
people think on this abstract level, they are drawn to the idea,
"There's got to be this fundamental distinction between how people think
about the way the world is and how people think about morality.
"
Or they think, "There's got to be some underlying competence that's
perfectly coherent, that is somehow shrouded over in some ways by these
distorting factors."
Then
there's a role that you can play as a theorist, of taking the thing that seems
to be given by the evidence—and that people would create a model that fits at
the level of this evidence—and reasserting it at the level of this abstract
theory, saying "We should believe this thing.
The
thing that is given by the evidence is the thing we should believe. We
shouldn't abandon it when we start to think more abstractly about these
questions."
It
seems like there's something, even among psychologists, that draws people
toward thinking about things in this incorrect way when you start to think
about them more abstractly, as opposed to trying to develop a model that
predicts the data that you have available. Maybe you don't feel that force
within you.
KAHNEMAN:
No. I'm not sure I do. In my
own career, I've made probably a lot of mileage out of the fact that people's
intuitions are not coherent. It's true
that the response to the work that Amos Tversky and I did, the surprise there
was because we were showing time and time again that intuitions are not
coherent. Now I have internalized that, and it's not surprising to me anymore.
It is not surprising to a psychologist.
What
is very interesting about experimental
philosophy, as against experimental psychology, is that when you start from
the assumption of coherence, the discovery of incoherence, you phrase it still
in the terms in which it should have been coherent and it isn't.
If
you think that abstract questions and concrete questions are completely
different, that is, when people think about ensembles, categories, or
abstractions, they are doing something entirely different, then there is less
puzzlement. We're asking a different question.
KNOBE:
It might be instructive to think about how people
within psychology most often reply to the kind of work that we are doing in
experimental philosophy. People raise alternative explanations just the way
that you have raised them, but the alternatives that people are normally
worried about are different from the ones you're worried about. The worries you
have are almost the converse of the worries that people usually have.
The
usual worry, the endless replies that I've been trying to beat back in my own
work, are that deep down in people's minds is this thing that's beautifully
coherent and perfectly scientific, and then there's just some annoying distorting
force that's getting in the way of them expressing it correctly.
If
only we could come up with a way of getting rid of that distorting force, then
the inner, coherent, perfectly scientific understanding that they had all along
would be able to shine forth.
People
who say this don't just say it in the abstract in the way that I just said.
They propose specific, testable things that would be a distorting force.
KAHNEMAN:
I agree entirely that that intuition and the search
for coherence is not restricted to philosophers.
There's
something to this reaction you're getting from psychologists who would be
flattered that philosophers are doing psychology—"Oh, yeah, you're finding
our work useful, and our approach to the world useful." This is a
compliment to us, and it colors our reaction to the work.
I
have another question of the same kind, which has to do with consciousness. Just describe the consciousness versus knowledge
distinction that you advance.
KNOBE:
We're interested in a question about a distinction
between two different types of psychological states.
On
the one hand, there are states like believing in something, wanting something,
intending something.
On
the other hand, there are states like experiencing pain, feeling happy, feeling
upset.
Sometimes
philosophers say that those second kinds of states have this quality of
phenomenal consciousness.
What
do you have to have in order to have those states, to be able to feel
something?
One
view you might have is that you have to be able to respond in a certain way to
your world; that's what makes you conscious.
Another
way is what you're like physically. It's that idea that we thought might be
onto something in terms of explaining people's intuitions, that there's
something about our embodiment—the fact that we have bodies—that
makes people think we're capable of having those states.
We tested
it in a number of different ways. For example, think about the difference
between a person and a corporation. Think about the difference between Bill
Gates and Microsoft. You can say, "Bill Gates believes that profits will
increase." You could also say something like, "Bill Gates is feeling
depressed." You could say, "Bill Gates intends to release new
products." You could also say something like, "Bill Gates is
experiencing true joy."
If
you ask about Microsoft, only one of those as possible. You could say,
"Microsoft intends to release a new product"; that's fine.
"Microsoft believes profits will increase"; that's also fine.
"Microsoft is feeling depressed"; that's not good. "Microsoft is
experiencing great joy"; that's not good.
Corporations
seem to have all of those states that don't seem to require a phenomenal
consciousness, but they lack all the ones that do require a phenomenal
consciousness.
Across
many different comparisons, not just between people and corporations, it seems
like it's this embodiment that makes you see it as having those kinds of
states.
KAHNEMAN:
About corporations, we have some rules about how we
attribute states of mind to corporations. Did the CIA know something? When you
unpack this, it's not the CIA knowing, it's some people within the CIA.
Who
are the people within the CIA who have to know something before the CIA can be
said to know that thing? That's a set of interesting questions, but they're
more about the application of states of mind to corporations than about the
deep philosophical questions. I was more interested in robots.
KNOBE:
You get the same exact effects when you turn to
robots. You have a robot that's just like you—Robo-Danny. On all psychological
tests, the robot would answer exactly the same thing that you would answer. If
we asked the robot if it experienced true love, the robot would answer and give
the exact same answer that you gave. Now, if we asked people if that robot
knows a lot about prospect theory, they would say absolutely. If we asked
people if the robot thinks it's in the midst of a videotaped interview—absolutely.
But then if you asked if the robot can feel happy, people tend to say no.
The
robot acts just like you do, but people would say it doesn't feel anything. The
key difference now between the robot and you is entirely a physical one.
The robot acts just like you, but it's made of metal.
KAHNEMAN:
Here, I differ. I have an alternative hypothesis,
which is eminently testable. You now have robots that have facial expressions.
If you had a robot that smiles appropriately, cries appropriately, and
expresses emotions appropriately, people would attribute emotions to that
robot, just as they do to other people.
We
attribute emotion to animals without asking questions about whether they feel
it or not. It's just whether the expression is compelling.
If
you had a robot who would answer some questions with a shaky voice, or would
express it with a tense voice, or with an angry voice, my view is that people
would very easily be convinced that that robot has feelings.
The
attribution of feelings derives from some physical cues that we get about
emotions, which we have learned from
our own emotions and the emotions of people around us when we're children.
KNOBE:
I think almost the same thing that you said. It's
not whether you believe
that this thing is biological, or whether you believe
that something has a body; it's whether the thing has certain cues that trigger
you on this non-conscious level to think of it biologically.
This
table, we don't think of biologically. A human being, we do think of
biologically. It's not just that we believe that a human being is something
biological; it's that even if something wasn't biological, like this example
you gave, if it moved in a certain way, if it made certain kinds of noises,
it could trigger us to think of it as biological.
To
test the hypothesis that it's not about your belief that the thing has a body
but how much you're thinking of it as being embodied, we ran a study with human
beings.
We
tried to manipulate the degree to which people think of human beings as having a
body. The way we did this is just by showing people pictures of human beings in
various states of undress. Like this, or taking their clothes off, or these
pornographic pictures of people. Just as you might expect, if you look at those
first kinds of states that I was talking about—the ability to reason and have
self-control—the more you see someone as having a body, the less you see them
as having any of those states.
With
regard to these other states—the capacity to feel afraid, to feel upset, to
experience pleasure, to feel happy—the more you take off your clothes, the more
you're seen as having those kinds of states. It seems like there is something
to what you're saying, that it's not just your knowledge of whether the other
person has a body.
The
subliminal cues—the quick cues that you're picking up on—are not to something
having emotions directly but rather to it being biological, cues to it having a
body. A robot could give off cues to having a body.
KAHNEMAN:
We are probably fairly close to agreement;
although, the language that you use to describe the findings is a fairly
different language. It's very abstract, and it derives from another field.
KNOBE:
That's the right way of thinking about it. As we
keep going through each of these different things, I always feel like we're
supposed to be getting into a fight, but then our fight never materializes.
It's because it's not at the level of the cognitive mechanism underlying each
finding.
KAHNEMAN:
No, we agree on those.
KNOBE:
It's at this level of ...
KAHNEMAN:
What's interesting. It is a difference in tastes.
Clearly, it reflects our backgrounds. As a teenager I discovered—that is what
drew me into psychology—that I was more interested in indignation than I was
interested in ethics. When you come from that direction, you have a different
mindset than when you come from ethics to indignation.
KNOBE:
Let's consider an analogy in this other field. A
lot of times in behavioral economics, people try to show that a certain effect
is interesting because they try to show a difference from what you'd do if
you're engaged in rational choice theory.
But
then it seems very puzzling because why would you ever think people would do
that?
You
might think in order for something to be interesting, it should be differing
from whatever priors I had given from previous research or something, not from
rational choice theory.
Do
you think rational choice theory somehow is playing an analogous role?
KAHNEMAN:
I agree. That's a beautiful analogy. I hadn't seen
it as clearly before as I see it now. It's very clear that we use economics in
the same way. It's a background, and then we use it as a source of null
hypotheses, we draw some concepts from it. Ultimately, to pursue the analogy a
little further, a term like "preference" or "belief" has a
particular meaning within rational choice theory.
The correct psychological
answer is that in those terms, there are no preferences and there are no
beliefs because whatever states of mind we have do not fulfill the logical
conditions for being preferences or being beliefs.
As a psychologist, I'm
sometimes there and sometimes I argue with economists, and I do exactly the
same thing that you do. The analogy is an excellent one.
Selected and edited from -- [my underlining, bold and dividing paragraphs for my easier understanding]
Selected and edited from -- [my underlining, bold and dividing paragraphs for my easier understanding]
https://www.edgeDotorg/conversation/joshua_knobe-daniel_kahneman-a-characteristic-difference
** **
1607
hours. This is an interesting conversation. For me though it does not answer
the problem of free will. For instance, What would a sophisticated and
consciously oriented robot like Ava played by Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina
think of free will versus determinism? I assume that if she believes
(abstract-theoretical) she has free will then she will act (concrete) accordingly.
Now, even if the belief is a fiction and she acts upon it, does the belief, now
concrete, make the belief a reality? It seems that the acting-on-the-belief is
real for her but for everyone else it may be a holistic fiction, i.e. madness. This
is a simplification but it suffices for me.
1638
hours. The problem with taking notes is that I do not have interplay with
another person, particularly one who knows more on the subjects at hand. I
remember Vlad R. once telling me that you don’t learn anything from winning a
game of chess, it is in the losing that one gains insight through study and
observation.
You still learn something from the reading
orndorff – the process begets the application. – Amorella
1644
hours. The process is closer to the abstract while the application is the
concrete.
Writing is the process; the outcome of the
writing is the concrete. – Amorella
1646
hours. Only, I think, if the final draft is bound, something I can put on a
shelf.
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