by Ethan Landes & Kevin Reuter: Figure 1: The concepts PLANET and DINOSAUR have recently undergone conceptual change. But can these changes be successfully implemented? Picture Credits: Picture of Pluto (by NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI). Reconstruction of a dromaeosaur dinosaur by Emily Willoughby (from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deinonychus_ewilloughby.png.) Like many other conceptual engineers, we are worried about the implementation challenge: How can we ensure that people adopt the conceptual changes that we propose? It seems to us that a thorough answer to this question needs to be ..read more

The Geography of Philosophy Project is proud to present our first video, “A New Approach to Philosophy.” We describe our goals and ambitions in a classroom-friendly manner. Check it out! and share it widely. Feel free to use it in classroom setting ..read more

Communicators don’t always tell the truth: sometimes they lie, and sometimes they just get things wrong. This can be a problem, as we seek reliable information to navigate the world. Enters the ‘norm of assertion’: the hypothesis that there is a linguistic rule in force in our linguistic community, which specifies exactly under which conditions we are entitled to assert a proposition. The thought is a familiar one: we are all acquainted with the idea that we should refrain from lying, and we all criticise mendacious claims when we unmask them. But some philosophers think that our mutual expect ..read more

We are happy to announce that our X-Phi Under Quarantine Online Discussion will re-start this week! The eighth instalment of the X-Phi Under Quarantine Online Discussion will take place on Friday, 12 June at 9:00AM NZST (Thursday, 11 June at 5:00PM EDT; Thursday, 11 June at 9:00PM GMT). Anyone who would like to attend the Zoom discussion (and isn’t already on our email list) should either leave a comment in the blog post or contact one of us: Justin (justin.sytsma@vuw.ac.nz), Dan (dan.weijers@waikato.ac.nz), or Joe (joe.ulatowski@waikato.ac.nz). For the upcoming meeting, we will discuss Wesley ..read more

The negative program in experimental philosophy is often fueled by spectacular empirical findings about unexpected variability in philosophical intuitions. The argument usually runs as follows: since certain intuitions are not universal (i.e. they are shaped by philosophically irrelevant factors such as ethnicity or gender), the consensus among philosophers should not be used as evidence in favor or against philosophical theses. Another argumentative strategy leading to a similar conclusion points at instability of intuitions: if intuitions are shaky, they are not reliable and should not be us ..read more

For many years, my collaborators, including Steve Stich, and I have investigated the extent to which judgments about topics of philosophical interest (e.g., knowledge, beauty, reference, deserved punishment and wrongness, etc.) vary across demographic groups. Because cultural psychology and anthropology (particularly, cognitive anthropology) provide us with a rich array of theories about the causes and nature of cultural differences as well with a catalogue of observed cultural differences (established in the lab or in the field), we have particularly investigated the variation of such judgmen ..read more