Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher

Experimental philosophy

Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a...

 currently employed as an assistant professor in the Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...

. Knobe received his B.A. at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in 1996 and his Ph.D. from Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 2006, where he studied under Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman

Gilbert Harman is a contemporary American philosopher, teaching at Princeton University, who has published widely in linguistics, semantics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller...

, among others. His work has been discussed in various media, including The New York Times and Slate, and he is a fairly frequent guest on the online news, science, and current events channel bloggingheads.tv

Bloggingheads.tv

Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...

.

The Knobe Effect

Knobe is arguably most widely known for what has come to be called "the Knobe effect" or the "Side-Effect Effect". According to Jones (2009):

Rather than consulting his own philosophical intuitions, Knobe set out to find out how ordinary people think about intentional action. In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.

Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit

Profit (accounting)

In accounting, profit can be considered to be the difference between the purchase price and the costs of bringing to market whatever it is that is accounted as an enterprise in terms of the component costs of delivered goods and/or services and any operating or other expenses.-Definition:There are...

 – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).

This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe. Instead, the moral character of an action’s consequences also seems to influence how non-moral aspects of the action – in this case, whether someone did something intentionally or not – are judged.

Selected publications

• Hitchcock, C. & Knobe, J. (forthcoming). "Cause and Norm". Journal of Philosophy.
• Knobe, J. (2009). "Answers to Five Questions". In Aguilar, J & Buckareff, A (eds.) Philosophy of Action: 5 Questions. London: Automatic Press. (PDF)
• Knobe, J., & Kelly, S. D. (2009). "Can one act for a reason without acting intentionally?" In C. Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action (pp. 169–183). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Knobe, J. & Nichols, S. (2008). Experimental Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Nichols, S. & Knobe, J. (2007). "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions". Nous, 41, 663-685.
• Knobe, J. (2006). "The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology". Philosophical Studies. 130: 203-231.
• Knobe, J. (2003a). "Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language". Analysis, 63, 190-193.
• Knobe, J. (2003b). "Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation". Philosophical Psychology, 16, 309-324.

External links

• Personal page with a list of published papers
• The Experimental Philosophy Page
• List of Video Discussions on bloggingheads.tv
  Bloggingheads.tv
  Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers...