El martes, 11 de noviembre, a las 13h, en la Sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tuvo lugar otra sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. En esta ocasión nos acompañó James Beebe, Director del Experimental Epistemology Research Group y miembro del Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Más abajo tenéis el título y el resumen de su charla, así como una breve nota sobre la trayectoria de James.
Title: «Folk Metaethics and Cooperation»
Abstract: Over the last two decades, moral psychologists have investigated folk metaethical attitudes, looking at whether people think that moral judgments are truth-apt, non-relative, and objectively, mind-independently true or whether they think that such judgments are non-truth-apt, subjective, or true only relative to individuals or cultures. Results from empirical studies of folk metaethics disconfirm some important claims philosophers have made about folk metaethics. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that lay people take moral judgments to be mind-independently true or false, moral psychologists have found that individuals appear to be more inclined toward a non-objectivist perspective with regard to most moral judgments and that most individuals adopt objectivist attitudes some of the time and non-objectivist attitudes at other times. Folk objectivist attitudes have also been shown to be predicted by how strongly individuals endorse correlative first-order moral judgments and the degree to which they think there is broad societal consensus about such judgments. At present, it is not clear how to interpret the overall body of results on folk metaethical attitudes, and there have been few attempts to offer unifying explanations that make sense of it all. Some scholars have even suggested that the many dimensions of variation that have been observed in folk metaethical attitudes reveal folk metaethics to be incoherent to such a degree that we should not expect there to be any unifying explanation of it. In this lecture, I will outline an explanation that makes sense of the empirical findings on folk metaethics by arguing that metaethical judgments play important roles in finding solutions to problems of social coordination and conflict and in the emergence and enforcement of social norms and conventions.
Bio: My primary research interests are in epistemology and experimental philosophy. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature and extent of human knowledge, rationality, and evidence. Experimental philosophy uses the tools of the cognitive and social sciences to shed light on topics of perennial philosophical debate. Within epistemology I have written about (i) skeptical challenges to our pretensions to know a good deal about the world and how best to respond to them, (ii) reliabilism (an epistemological theory that says the frequency of objectively getting things right is all that matters for knowledge and rationality), and (iii) a priori knowledge (knowledge that is obtained by the exercise of human reason independently of the use of the senses). Within experimental philosophy, I’ve investigated (i) how moral judgments about people’s actions affect judgments about how much knowledge those people have, (ii) crosscultural differences in people’s intuitions about the meaning of proper names, (iii) whether people think moral judgments are objectively true or are more subjective and culturally variable, and (iv) what scientists from different disciplines think about the objectivity of science.