Experimental Epistemology Research Group

James R. Beebe & Wesley Buckwalter, "The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect" Mind & Language (forthcoming) [draft]

Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the relationship between knowledge and action.

James R. Beebe & Mark Jensen, "Surprising Connections Between Knowledge and Action: The Robustness of the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect" (in progress)

We report findings that build upon the work of Beebe & Buckwalter (forthcoming) and demonstrate the robustness of the epistemic side-effect effect. We found that subjects are more likely to attribute knowledge to an agent if the agent is engaged in an action that leads to some kind of aesthetic or prudential harm than if the agent's action leads to an aesthetic or prudential benefit or good. We also report results that cast further doubt on attempts to explain the asymmetric pattern of responses characteristic of the epistemic side-effect effect in terms of attributions of blame to putative knowers. Respondents show a strong inclination to attribute knowledge even in cases where putative knowers are engaged in laudable actions and, hence, are not proper targets of blame.

James R. Beebe & Mark Jensen, "Action Significance and the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect" (in progress)

We report and explain experimental results that demonstrate a marked correlation between subjects' willingness to attribute knowledge and the significance of the actions based upon the beliefs in question.

Wesley Buckwalter, "Knowledge Isn't Closed on Saturdays" (under review) [draft]

Recent theories of epistemic contextualism have challenged traditional invariantist positions in epistemology by claiming that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions fluctuate between conversational contexts. Contextualists often garner support for this view by appealing to folk intuitions regarding the knowledge practices of normal agents in everyday speech. Proposed is a set of experiments designed to test for the descriptive conditions upon which these types of contextualist defenses rely. In the cases tested, experiments indicate that the contextualist pattern of knowledge attribution does not obtain among ordinary speakers. These results, while preliminary, inspire prima facie skepticism for the contextualist hypothesis regarding knowledge claims, as well as challenge certain predictions made by recent theories of subject-sensitive invariantism. It is further argued that these findings raise methodological questions concerning the practice of parlaying an assumption of intuitions, with respect to ordinary language practices, into philosophical conclusions regarding knowledge.

James R. Beebe, "Experimental Epistemology" in Andrew Cullison (ed.) A Companion to Epistemology (Continuum; in progress)

Provides an overview of the subfield of experimental epistemology.