Florian Cova
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 459650 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Florian Cova |
| PRENOMES | Florian |
| SOBRENOME | Cova |
| ASSINATURA | COVA F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Geneva |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9360-8290 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 3 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2012 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
From self-transcendent emotions to transcendent experiences
Mystical experiences are generally considered to be rare and special experiences, characterized by feelings of unity and self-loss. Still, certain researchers have recently proposed that mystical experiences could be placed on a continuum with more common and mundane experiences. In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study, the goal of which was to identify ordinary experiences that might share (though to a lesser degree) the ke…
Deciding What to Believe or Deciding What to Do? An Empirical Investigation of the Folk Conception of Critical Thinking
This study investigates how the expression ‘critical thinking’ (CT) is understood and used by the general public in the United States, using the tools of experimental philosophy. Based on responses from 288 non‐philosopher participants, our findings suggest that CT is commonly associated with problem solving, decision making and logical analysis. This folk conception aligns more closely with psychological definitions than with philosophical accou…
The Overlooked Self-Transcendent Nature of Meaning in Life
The prevailing consensus in the psychological literature regarding the construct of meaning in life typically aligns with a tripartite perspective. In this article, we advance theoretical arguments and present empirical evidence that challenge this prevailing view, arguing that the self-transcendent nature of meaning in life has been overlooked, particularly the importance of evaluating one’s life as having a positive impact. Our introduction put…
Educated folk intuitions about free will and determinism
Experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, wondering whether our intuitive understanding of free will and moral responsibility make them compatible or incompatible with determinism. However, methodological worries have been raised concerning such studies: some have claimed that participants in such studies are simply unable to understand the materials they are presented with. To byp…
The role of self-transcendent emotions in psychedelic experiences
Psychedelics are known to elicit intense and meaningful subjective experiences. These subjective experiences are supposed to play a major role in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. However, not much attention has been paid to the role played by emotions in these experiences. In this paper, we argue that typical psychedelic-induced experiences share many phenomenological features with two emotions: awe (which involves a reduced sense of the self,…
Failure to Comprehend Determinism or Failure to Measure Comprehension? Methodological Issues in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will
In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility using vignettes depicting agents in deterministic universes. However, recent research suggests that participants massively fail to understand these vignettes. Moreover, it has also been proposed that these comprehension errors might even be systematic and thus unavoidable, threateni…
Experimental Philosophy for Beginners
What's Wrong with Bullshit
Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that the…
Delving into depth
We sometimes say about certain things (such as philosophical questions) that they are ‘deep’ or ‘profound’. But what does it mean exactly? Surprisingly, philosophers have been quite silent on this topic and there is neither consensual nor prominent conceptual analysis of ‘depth’. After surveying different proposals that have tried to capture depth in terms of explanatory depth, subject matter, emotional impact, understanding or complexity, we pre…
What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives
It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person…
A validation and comparison of three measures of participants’ disposition to feel moved (introducing the Geneva Sentimentality Scale)
In the past years, psychologists have been increasingly interested in feelings of "being moved" (or "touched") and their impact on cognition and behaviour. However, to better understand their long-term impact, we need a validated measure of participants' disposition to feel "moved". In this paper, we introduce the Geneva Sentimentality Scale (GSS), a measure of participants' disposition to feel moved. After describing its construction (Study 1) a…
Performative Quantification
In recent years, researchers have emphasized the relevance of data about commonsense moral judgments for ethical decision-making, notably in the context of debates about autonomous vehicles (AVs). As such, the results of empirical studies such as the Machine Moral Experiment have been influential in debates about the ethics of AVs and some researchers have even put forward methods to automatize ethical decision-making on the basis of such data. I…
One more time”
In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have investigated folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, and their compatibility with determinism. To determine whether laypeople are “natural compatibilists” or “natural incompatibilists”, they have used vignettes describing agents living in deterministic universes. However, later research has suggested that participants’ answers to these studies are plagued with comprehension er…
Utilitarianism and the Moral Status of Animals
Reactance, morality, and disgust
Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behaviour. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviours such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper i…
Children’s Relative Living Proximity and Intergenerational Support to Older Parents in China
Although research has recognized the influence of geographic proximity on intergenerational support in Chinese families, the effect of siblings’ geographic proximity remains unexplored. Guided by the within-family differences approach, this study uses data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine how the relativity of children’s and their siblings’ geographic proximity is associated with children’s support to older paren…
Is the phenomenological overflow argument really supported by subjective reports
Does phenomenal consciousness overflow access consciousness? Some researchers have claimed that it does, relying on interpretations of various psychological experiments such as Sperling's or Landman's, and crucially using alleged subjective reports from participants to argue in favor of these interpretations. However, systematic empirical investigations of participants' subjective reports are scarce. To fill this gap, we reproduced Sperling's and…
Retracted
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). The authors discovered from comments on their open data that Studies 1 and 2 of their manuscript suffered from a serious flaw. There was a mistake in the Python code they used, and the items (vignettes) were not properly randomized across conditions. In Study 1 (which investigated the effect of cognitive load on mor…
How pills undermine skills
Passions sociales
La question animale, pour le meilleur et pour le pire
Free love? On the relation between belief in free will, determinism, and passionate love
Moral asymmetries and the semantics of "many"
We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluations people make of sentences involving many, showing that two sentences of the form many As are Bs and many As are Cs need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard…
Le libre arbitre, une illusion nécessaire
Nos intuitions sont-elles fiables
Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics
In the past decade, experimental philosophy - the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods - has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental work…
Judgments about moral responsibility and determinism in patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia
On Doing Things Intentionally
Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb ‘intentionally’. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb ‘intentionally’ has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data …
Moral responsibility and free will
Sommes-nous naturellement crédules
Moral asymmetries and the semantics of "many"
We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluations people make of sentences involving many, showing that two sentences of the form many As are Bs and many As are Cs need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard…
Le libre arbitre, une illusion nécessaire
Nos intuitions sont-elles fiables
Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics
In the past decade, experimental philosophy - the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods - has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental work…
Free love? On the relation between belief in free will, determinism, and passionate love
La question animale, pour le meilleur et pour le pire
Passions sociales
Is the phenomenological overflow argument really supported by subjective reports
Does phenomenal consciousness overflow access consciousness? Some researchers have claimed that it does, relying on interpretations of various psychological experiments such as Sperling's or Landman's, and crucially using alleged subjective reports from participants to argue in favor of these interpretations. However, systematic empirical investigations of participants' subjective reports are scarce. To fill this gap, we reproduced Sperling's and…
Retracted
This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). The authors discovered from comments on their open data that Studies 1 and 2 of their manuscript suffered from a serious flaw. There was a mistake in the Python code they used, and the items (vignettes) were not properly randomized across conditions. In Study 1 (which investigated the effect of cognitive load on mor…
How pills undermine skills
Utilitarianism and the Moral Status of Animals
Reactance, morality, and disgust
Emergency situations require individuals to make important changes in their behaviour. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, official recommendations to avoid the spread of the virus include costly behaviours such as self-quarantining or drastically diminishing social contacts. Compliance (or lack thereof) with these recommendations is a controversial and divisive topic, and lay hypotheses abound regarding what underlies this divide. This paper i…
Children’s Relative Living Proximity and Intergenerational Support to Older Parents in China
Although research has recognized the influence of geographic proximity on intergenerational support in Chinese families, the effect of siblings’ geographic proximity remains unexplored. Guided by the within-family differences approach, this study uses data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine how the relativity of children’s and their siblings’ geographic proximity is associated with children’s support to older paren…
What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives
It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person…
A validation and comparison of three measures of participants’ disposition to feel moved (introducing the Geneva Sentimentality Scale)
In the past years, psychologists have been increasingly interested in feelings of "being moved" (or "touched") and their impact on cognition and behaviour. However, to better understand their long-term impact, we need a validated measure of participants' disposition to feel "moved". In this paper, we introduce the Geneva Sentimentality Scale (GSS), a measure of participants' disposition to feel moved. After describing its construction (Study 1) a…
Performative Quantification
In recent years, researchers have emphasized the relevance of data about commonsense moral judgments for ethical decision-making, notably in the context of debates about autonomous vehicles (AVs). As such, the results of empirical studies such as the Machine Moral Experiment have been influential in debates about the ethics of AVs and some researchers have even put forward methods to automatize ethical decision-making on the basis of such data. I…
One more time”
In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have investigated folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, and their compatibility with determinism. To determine whether laypeople are “natural compatibilists” or “natural incompatibilists”, they have used vignettes describing agents living in deterministic universes. However, later research has suggested that participants’ answers to these studies are plagued with comprehension er…
Experimental Philosophy for Beginners
What's Wrong with Bullshit
Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that the…
Delving into depth
We sometimes say about certain things (such as philosophical questions) that they are ‘deep’ or ‘profound’. But what does it mean exactly? Surprisingly, philosophers have been quite silent on this topic and there is neither consensual nor prominent conceptual analysis of ‘depth’. After surveying different proposals that have tried to capture depth in terms of explanatory depth, subject matter, emotional impact, understanding or complexity, we pre…
Educated folk intuitions about free will and determinism
Experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, wondering whether our intuitive understanding of free will and moral responsibility make them compatible or incompatible with determinism. However, methodological worries have been raised concerning such studies: some have claimed that participants in such studies are simply unable to understand the materials they are presented with. To byp…
Psychology (16 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (15 obras) · Computer Science (10 obras) · Social Psychology (10 obras) · Cognitive psychology (6 obras) · Free Will and Agency (6 obras) · Determinism (5 obras) · Empirical research (5 obras)