Joshua Knobe
Biographic Data
| ID | 161000 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua Knobe |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua |
| FAMILY NAME | Knobe |
| SIGNATURE | KNOBE J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0733-3775 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Conflicting Intuitions
Research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments shows a striking pattern. Often, there are powerful intuitions on one side and also powerful intuitions on the exact opposite side. A question now arises about how to understand this pattern. One possible view would be that it is primarily a matter of different people having different intuitions. I present evidence for the view that this is not the correct understanding. Instead, I su…
Dimensions of identity-representing belief
No privileged link between intentionality and causation
The Inauthentic Online Self
People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed onli…
The development of the “first thing that comes to mind”
When children encounter information about the world that is descriptive (e.g., frequency distributions) or prescriptive (e.g., value judgments), can they keep track of both types of information together? Do they, like adults, integrate these two kinds of information to come up with the "first thing that comes to mind"? Can children separate these types of information when needed? In two experiments, we examined how children ( N = 397, ages 4-9 ye…
The Shape of Blame
For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is blame‐ or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as “replying to an email in x days,” whether a specific reply is perceived as blameworthy or praiseworthy will depend on how many days have elapsed before the reply. Such behaviors lie on a continuum in which part of the continuum is prais…
Sad Art Gives Voice to Our Own Sadness
People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional , and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. In this alternative hypothesis, describi…
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy
The fifth volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy showcases the growing depth and breadth of the field. The essays here advance debates in several areas of experimental philosophy, including the measurement of beliefs about free will and moral objectivism, as well as methodological issues at the core of both experimental philosophy and philosophy more generally. This volume also includes work on new topics in experimental philosophy: …
Capacity for Social Norms, or Statistical and Prescriptive Hybrid
Biological Essentialism Correlates With (But Doesn’t Cause?) Intergroup Bias
People with biological essentialist beliefs about social groups also tend to endorse biased beliefs about individuals in those groups, including intensified emphasis on the group, stereotypes, and prejudices. These correlations could be due to biological essentialism causing bias, and some experimental studies support this causal direction. Given this prior work, we expected to find that biological essentialism would lead to increased bias compar…
On the Value of Sad Music
Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then explore …
‘You do it like this!’
Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like You do it like this, seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like A person does it like this. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to exp…
Difference and Robustness in the Patterns of Philosophical Intuition Across Demographic Groups
Purposes in Law and in Life
There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purpo…
Teleology beyond explanation
People often think of objects teleologically. For instance, we might understand a hammer in terms of its purpose of driving in nails. But how should we understand teleological thinking in the first place? This paper separates mere teleology (simply ascribing a telos) and teleological explanation (thinking something is explained by its telos) by examining cases where an object was designed for one purpose but is now widely used for a different pur…
Why do evaluative judgments affect emotion attributions? The roles of judgments about fittingness and the true self
An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4
Like its predecessor, the fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy showcases the growing depth and breadth of the field. Epistemology and moral psychology have been important foci of past work in experimental philosophy, and the contributions in this volume attest to the ways in which empirical methods are being used to add nuance to previous claims, both theoretical and empirical. Alongside this progress on familiar topics, we …
The Ordinary Concept of True Love
When we say that what two people feel for each other is “true love,” we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The fir…
Changing use of formal methods in philosophy
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4
Dual Character Art Concepts
Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept art . At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts . Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon tha…
What comes to mind
Antidemocracy in America
International law and its transformation through the outlawry of war
The First World War was the last great war of what we have called the ‘old world order’—the legal regime that European states adopted in the seventeenth century and spent the next three centuries imposing on the rest of the globe. This order formed the basis of what scholars call ‘classical international law’. But this body of rules differed starkly from the ones that govern today: the old world order did not just sanction war, it relied on and r…
The Folk Concept of Intentionality
More than a body
According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's …
Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior
Traditional attribution theory conceptualizes explanations of behavior as referring to either dispositional or situational causes. An alternative approach, the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanation, distinguishes multiple discrete modes of explanation and specific features within each mode. Because attribution theory and the folk-conceptual theory carve up behavior explanations in distinct ways, they offer very different predictions abou…
Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations
Experimental Philosophy
Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science - systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it…
Free to punish
Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free will belief, we tested the hypothesis that a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their …
The Folk Concepts of Intention and Intentional Action
Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of intention and their use of the concept of acting intentionally. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their…
Law, Morality, and Everything Else
In this article, we propose a novel account of general jurisprudence by situating it within the broader project of metanormative inquiry. We begin by showing how general jurisprudence is parallel to another well-known part of that project, namely, metaethics. We then argue that these projects all center on the same task: explaining how a certain part of thought, talk, and reality fits into reality overall. Metalegal inquiry aims to explain how le…
Which behaviors do people explain? A basic actor–observer asymmetry
Attribution research as focused on how people xplain behavior; the present paper examines which behaviors they explain. The authors introduce a framework that specifies when people wonder about and explain an event. Applied to behavior, the framework predicts which behavioral events (intentional vs. unintentional nd observable vs. unobservable) actors and observers tend to explain: (a)Actors wonder more often about unintentional nd unobservable b…
Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments
Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance
Kauppinen argues that experimental philosophy cannot help us to address questions about the semantics of our concepts and that it therefore has little to contribute to the discipline of philosophy. This argument raises fascinating questions in the philosophy of language, but it is simply a red herring in the present context. Most researchers in experimental philosophy were not trying to resolve semantic questions in the first place. Their aim was…
Changing use of formal methods in philosophy
International law and its transformation through the outlawry of war
The First World War was the last great war of what we have called the ‘old world order’—the legal regime that European states adopted in the seventeenth century and spent the next three centuries imposing on the rest of the globe. This order formed the basis of what scholars call ‘classical international law’. But this body of rules differed starkly from the ones that govern today: the old world order did not just sanction war, it relied on and r…
Folk judgments of causation
Experimental Philosophy and Folk Concepts
Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations
The traditional approach to studying behavior explanations involves treating them as either person causes or situation causes and assessing them by using rating scales. An analysis of people's free-response behavior explanations reveals, however, that the conceptual distinctions people use in their explanations are more complex and sophisticated than the person-situation dichotomy suggests. The authors, therefore, introduce a model of the concept…
Response to critics
In this article, we respond to comments raised in an Agora published by Global Constitutionalism on The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. Specifically, we address (1) the causal efficacy of international law, (2) the causal mechanism by which international law changes state behavior, (3) how new is the New World Order, and (4) we defend our normative claim in close of the book that, for all its imperfections, t…
Variantism About Responsibility
Sentimental Rules
Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a non-zero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument.…
Which behaviors do people explain? A basic actor-observer asymmetry
Attribution research has focused on how people explain behavior; the present paper examines which behaviors they explain.The authors introduce a framework that specifies when people wonder about and explain an event.Applied to behavior, the framework predicts which behavioral events (intentional vs. unintentional and observable vs. unobservable) actors and observers tend to explain: (a)Actors wonder more often about unintentional and unobservable…
The Folk Concept of Intentionality
Which behaviors do people explain? A basic actor–observer asymmetry
Attribution research as focused on how people xplain behavior; the present paper examines which behaviors they explain. The authors introduce a framework that specifies when people wonder about and explain an event. Applied to behavior, the framework predicts which behavioral events (intentional vs. unintentional nd observable vs. unobservable) actors and observers tend to explain: (a)Actors wonder more often about unintentional nd unobservable b…
Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations
The traditional approach to studying behavior explanations involves treating them as either person causes or situation causes and assessing them by using rating scales. An analysis of people's free-response behavior explanations reveals, however, that the conceptual distinctions people use in their explanations are more complex and sophisticated than the person-situation dichotomy suggests. The authors, therefore, introduce a model of the concept…
Conceptual structure and social functions of behavior explanations
Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language
There has been a long-standing dispute in the philosophical literature about the conditions under which a behavior counts as 'intentional.' Much of the debate turns on questions about the use of certain words and phrases in ordinary language. The present paper investigates these questions empirically, using experimental techniques to investigate people's use of the relevant words and phrases. g
Intentional action in folk psychology
Four experiments examined people's folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not evaluative considerations--considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame--played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence people's judgments as to whether or not that behavior should be considered "intentional." After eliminating a number of …
Experimental Philosophy and Folk Concepts
The Folk Concepts of Intention and Intentional Action
Recent studies point to a surprising divergence between people's use of the concept of intention and their use of the concept of acting intentionally. It seems that people's application of the concept of intention is determined by their beliefs about the agent's psychological states whereas their use of the concept of acting intentionally is determined at least in part by their beliefs about the moral status of the behavior itself (i.e., by their…
Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a non-zero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument.…
The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology
Moral psychology is the branch of ethics directly concerned with the psychology of the kind of agency we exercise in acting morally. Moral psychology asks whether such agency is psychologically possible, what motivations it requires, what the source of those motivations might be, and what the emotive and cognitive mechanisms are by which they translate into actions. Until fairly recently (e.g., Doris 2002; Nichols 2004; Prinz forthcoming), Anglop…
Variantism About Responsibility
Sentimental Rules
Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance
Kauppinen argues that experimental philosophy cannot help us to address questions about the semantics of our concepts and that it therefore has little to contribute to the discipline of philosophy. This argument raises fascinating questions in the philosophy of language, but it is simply a red herring in the present context. Most researchers in experimental philosophy were not trying to resolve semantic questions in the first place. Their aim was…
Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior
Traditional attribution theory conceptualizes explanations of behavior as referring to either dispositional or situational causes. An alternative approach, the folk-conceptual theory of behavior explanation, distinguishes multiple discrete modes of explanation and specific features within each mode. Because attribution theory and the folk-conceptual theory carve up behavior explanations in distinct ways, they offer very different predictions abou…
Experimental Philosophy
Claims about people's intuitions have long played an important role in philosophical debates. The new field of experimental philosophy seeks to subject such claims to rigorous tests using the traditional methods of cognitive science - systematic experimentation and statistical analysis. Work in experimental philosophy thus far has investigated people's intuitions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Although it…
Experimental Philosophy
Abstract Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic experiments to reach a better understanding of people’s ordinary intuitions about philosophically significant questions. Although the movement is only a few years old, it has already sp…
Experimental philosophy
An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto
It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or pol…
Cause and Norm
Much of the philosophical literature on causation has focused on the concept of “actual” causation, sometimes called “token” causation. In particular, it is this notion of actual causation that many philosophical theories of causation have attempted to capture. In this paper, we address the question: What purpose does this concept serve? As we shall see in the next section, one does not need this concept for purposes of prediction or rational del…
Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays
Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust ("disgust sensitivity") is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior ha…
Folk judgments of causation
Person as scientist, person as moralist
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic …
Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?
Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colomb…
Do Theories of Implicit Race Bias Change Moral Judgments
Epistemology (45 works) · Psychology (44 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Social Psychology (34 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (31 works) · Cognitive psychology (21 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (14 works) · Cognition (11 works)