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Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.

This paper discusses, from the point of view of the philosophy of psychology, recent behavioral and brain studies showing effects of the diversity of language vocabulary on color perception. I examine the alternative between two different interpretations of these so-called whorfian effects, namely habitual or deep whorfianism, and shallow whorfianism. I argue that at the moment the evidence underdetermines both interpretations and the question is open. I also clarify that shallow whorfianism is not a synonym for ‘trivial whorfianism’, as some authors have suggested, but rather it makes a case for the online and situated nature of human cognition

Many philosophers hold that experts' semantic intuitions are more reliable and provide better evidence than lay people's intuitions - a thesis commonly called "the Expertise Defense." Focusing on the intuitions about the reference of proper names, this article critically assesses the Expertise Defense.

In this article, we review some important controversies about concepts in the philosophy of psychology, focusing particularly on the theories of concepts developed in philosophy, on the debate about the homogeneity of concepts, on neo-empiricism, and on concept learning. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In previous work, we presented evidence suggesting that ordinary people do not conceive of subjective experiences as having phenomenal qualities. We then argued that these findings undermine a common justification given for the reality of the hard problem of consciousness. In a thought-provoking article, Talbot has challenged our argument. In this article, we respond to his criticism. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.

The article provides an overview on the approaches used to study the relation between culture and cognition. Psychological universals can be defined as those traits, processes, dispositions, or functions that recur across cultures, with at least a subset of each population exhibiting the trait. The strongest test of the universality of a given psychological trait is to search for it across maximally disparate cultures because traits may recur across cultures due to cultural influences alone. One methodological concern, however, is that whether or not a trait is identified in different cultures will depend in part on how the trait is defined. Some traits may be psychological universals because they are homologies. A trait is generatively entrenched if its development is a necessary condition for the development of other traits. Most modifications of a generatively entrenched trait are selected against because they prevent the development of these other traits. The approximate number sense, evident in cultures as diverse as small-scale hunter-horticulturalist societies and modern, technologically complex societies, is also present in numerous animal species. A number of uniquely human psychological traits are also universal because their development has been canalized during the evolution of human cognition. Natural selection selects against development pathways that rely on specific environmental inputs when these environmental inputs vary, when variation in these environmental inputs cause the development of variable traits, and when there is a single optimally adaptive variant.

In this article, I argue that philosophers' intuitions about reference are not more reliable than lay people's and that intuitions about the reference of proper names and uses of proper names provide equally good evidence for theories of reference.

In several disciplines within science-evolutionary biology, molecular biology, astrobiology, synthetic biology, artificial life-and outside science-primarily ethics-efforts to define life have recently multiplied. However, no consensus has emerged. In this article, I argue that this is no accident. I propose a dilemma showing that the project of defining life is either impossible or pointless. The notion of life at stake in this project is either the folk concept of life or a scientific concept. In the former case, empirical evidence shows that life cannot be defined. In the latter case, I argue that, although defining life may be possible, it is pointless. I conclude that scientists, philosophers, and ethicists should discard the project of defining life. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

The disagreement between philosophers about the scientific worth of the evolutionary behavioral sciences (evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, etc.) is in part due to the fact that critics and advocates of these sciences characterize them very differently. In this article, by analyzing quantitatively the citations made in the articles published in Evolution & Human Behavior between January 2000 and December 2002, we provide some evidence that undermines the characterization of the evolutionary behavioral sciences put forward by their critics. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved.

Carey holds that the study of conceptual development bears on the theories of concepts developed by philosophers and psychologists. In this commentary, I scrutinize her claims about the significance of the study of conceptual development. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.

Previous research suggests that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures. After having examined and criticized some recent objections formulated against this body of research, I argue that, in combination with some plausible assumptions, variation of intuitions within and across cultures entails some form of referential pluralism - viz. the same word (e.g., "Paris" ) can refer differently for different competent speakers - and that, as a consequence, an infl uential kind of ontological disagreement (disagreements about whether there are such things as x's or whether x's are identical to y's) is vacuous. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further studies that extend and refine our account of this aspect of folkbiology. We examine biologically naive subjects' judgments about whether traits of an animal are 'innate', 'in its DNA' or 'part of its nature'. Subjects do not understand these three descriptions to be equivalent. Both innate and in its DNA have the connotation that the trait is species-typical. This poses an obstacle to the assimilation of the biology of polymorphic and plastic traits by biologically naive audiences. Researchers themselves may not be immune to the continuing pull of folkbiological modes of thought. © 2011 The Royal Society.

While thought experiments play an important role in contemporary analytic philosophy, much remains unclear about thought experiments. In particular, it is still unclear whether the judgments elicited by thought experiments can provide evidence for the premises of philosophical arguments. This article argues that, if an influential and promising view about the nature of the judgments elicited by thought experiments is correct, then many thought experiments in philosophy fail to provide any evidence for the premises of philosophical arguments. © 2011 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

In this commentary, I argue that to properly assess the significance of the cross-cultural findings reviewed by Henrich et al., one needs to understand better the causes of the variation in performance in experimental tasks across cultures. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010.

In this article, I focus on two claims made by Appiah in Experiments in Ethics: Doris's and Harman's criticism of virtue ethics fails, and moral psychology can be used to identify erroneous moral intuitions. I argue that both claims are erroneous. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

In this précis, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts, and I explain why eliminating the notion of concept would contribute to the progress of the psychology of higher cognition. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This chapter examines whether morality really evolved, as many philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists claim. It distinguishes three possible versions of this claim and reviews the evidence in support of each. It concludes that two versions of the claim that morality evolved are relatively well supported, but that they are unlikely to have significant philosophical consequences, while the stronger version, which is of real interest to philosophers, is in fact empirically unsupported.

This chapter argues that current work on racial cognition is relevant to many of philosophers' concerns about race. It first examines several positions within the philosophy of race, pointing out where facts about the psychology of race could have an impact upon the feasibility of reform proposals offered by philosophers. It then reviews two relatively separate sets of psychological literature. The first shows that the content of racial thought is not a simple product of one's social environment, but is also shaped by the operation of certain evolved psychological mechanisms. After drawing out implications of this work for several types of proposals made by philosophers, it turns to the question of racial evaluation. Recent studies suggest that implicit racist biases can exist and influence behavior even in persons sincerely professing tolerant or even anti-racist views, and that implicit racial evaluations can be insulated in important ways from more explicitly held beliefs. The chapter then argues that these findings bear on the feasibility of proposals made in the philosophical literature on race, and may be useful in shaping novel proposals.

In this response to Malt's and Prinz's commentaries, I argue that neo-empiricist hypotheses fail to threaten the argument for the elimination of 'concept' because they are unlikely to be true of all concepts, if they are true at all. I also defend the hypothesis that we possess bodies of knowledge retrieved by default from long-term memory, and I argue that prototypes, exemplars, and theories form genuinely distinct concepts. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: what are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important aspect of the philosophical temperament is that philosophers are especially reflective: they are less likely than their peers to embrace what seems obvious without questioning it. This claim is supported by a study of more than 4,000 philosophers and non-philosophers, the results of which indicate that even when we control for overall education level, philosophers tend to be significantly more reflective than their peers. We then illustrate this tendency by considering what we know about the philosophizing of a few prominent philosophers. Recognizing this aspect of the philosophical temperament, it is natural to wonder how philosophers came to be this way: does philosophical training teach reflectivity or do more reflective people tend to gravitate to philosophy? We consider the limitations of our data with respect to this question and suggest that a longitudinal study be conducted. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

We argue that the motivations that underlie stereotype-based discrimination against racial minorities and other stigmatized groups often fail to meet standard criteria for rational judgments. Stereotyping of such groups is often driven by threats to one's self-esteem and a desire to rationalize inequality, and declines when the perceiver is motivated to be accurate. Also, Bayesian racism-the belief that it is rational to discriminate against individuals based on stereotypes about their racial group-correlates highly with negative feelings toward minorities and the desire to keep low-status groups in their place, and correlates negatively with indices of rational thinking. The motives that drive social judgments call into question whether people engage in stereotype-based discrimination for rational reasons. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010.

Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. This book argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. The book shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. The book concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification.

The assumption that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is pretheoretical is often found in the philosophical debates on consciousness. Unfortunately, this assumption has not received the kind of empirical attention that it deserves. We suspect that this is in part due to difficulties that arise in attempting to test folk intuitions about consciousness. In this article we elucidate and defend a key methodological principle for this work. We draw this principle out by considering recent experimental work on the topic by Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008). We charge that their studies do not establish that the folk have a concept of phenomenal consciousness in part because they compare group agents to individuals. The problem is that group agents and individuals differ in some significant ways in terms of functional organization and behavior. We propose that future experiments should establish that ordinary people are disposed to ascribe different mental states to entities that are given behaviorally and functionally equivalent descriptions.

In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcia's views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcia's moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the diversity of what makes racial ills morally wrong. © 2009 Sage Publications.

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference. © 2009 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC.

The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a 'folk biological' theory of the 'inner natures' of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why these analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines the appeal of these analyses, whether understood as analyses of the vernacular concept or as explications of that concept for the purposes of science. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Recent experimental findings by Knobe and others (Knobe, 2003; Nadelhoffer, 2006b; Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007) have been at the center of a controversy about the nature of the folk concept of intentional action. I argue that the significance of these findings has been overstated. My discussion is two-pronged. First, I contend that barring a consensual theory of conceptual competence, the significance of these experimental findings for the nature of the concept of intentional action cannot be determined. Unfortunately, the lack of progress in the philosophy of concepts casts doubt on whether such a consensual theory will be found. Second, I propose a new, deflationary interpretation of these experimental findings, 'the trade-off hypothesis', and I present several new experimental findings that support this interpretation. © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Philosophers of biology, such as David Hull and Michael Ghiselin, have argued that the notion of human nature is incompatible with modern evolutionary biology and they have recommended rejecting this notion. In this article, I rebut this argument: I show that an important notion of human nature is compatible with modern evolutionary biology.

In The Architecture of the Mind, Carruthers proposes a new and detailed explanation for how human cognition could be both flexible and massively modular. The combinatorial nature of our linguistic faculty and our capacity to engage in inner speech are the cornerstones of this new explanation. Despite the ingenuity of this proposal, I argue that Carruthers has failed to explain how a massively modular mind could display the flexibility that is characteristic of human thought. © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This article examines and rejects the claim that 'innateness is canalization'. Waddington's concept of canalization is distinguished from the narrower concept of environmental canalization with which it is often confused. Evidence is presented that the concept of environmental canalization is not an accurate analysis of the existing concept of innateness. The strategy of 'biologicizing the mind' by treating psychological or behavioral traits as if they were environmentally canalized physiological traits is criticized using data from developmental psychobiology. It is concluded that identifying innateness with environmental canalization can only result in adding unhelpful associations from 'folkbiology' to the relatively precise idea of canalization.

It is difficult to overestimate Paul Meehl's influence on judgment and decision-making research. His ‘disturbing little book’ (Meehl, 1986, p. 370) Clinical versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence (1954) is known as an attack on human judgment and a call for replacing clinicians with actuarial methods. More than 40 years later, fast and frugal heuristics—proposed as models of human judgment—were formalized, tested, and found to be surprisingly accurate, often more so than the actuarial models that Meehl advocated. We ask three questions: Do the findings of the two programs contradict each other? More generally, how are the programs conceptually connected? Is there anything they can learn from each other? After demonstrating that there need not be a contradiction, we show that both programs converge in their concern to develop (a) domain-specific models of judgment and (b) nonlinear process models that arise from the bounded nature of judgment. We then elaborate the differences between the programs and discuss how these differences can be viewed as mutually instructive: First, we show that the fast and frugal heuristic models can help bridge the clinical—actuarial divide, that is, they can be developed into actuarial methods that are both accurate and easy to implement by the unaided clinical judge. We then argue that Meehl's insistence on improving judgment makes clear the importance of examining the degree to which heuristics are used in the clinical domain and how acceptable they would be as actuarial tools. © 2008, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

The operationalization of scientific notions is instrumental in enabling experimental evidence to bear on scientific propositions. Conceptual change should thus translate into operationalization change. This article describes some important experimental works in the psychology of concepts since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that since the early days of this field, psychologists' theoretical understanding of concepts has been modified several times. However, in all cases but one, these theoretical changes did not translate into changes in the operationalization of the notion of concept learning. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key problems: the difficulty of sorting out amodal predictions from neo-empiricist predictions, the difficulty of finding experimental tasks that are not best solved by imagery and the difficulty of generalizing findings concerning a given cognitive process in a given context to other cognitive processes or other contexts. Finally, solutions to these three problems are considered. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Quartz (2002) argues that some recent findings about the evolution of the brain (Finlay and Darlington 1995) are inconsistent with evolutionary psychologists' massive modularity hypothesis. In substance, Quartz contends that since the volume of the neocortex evolved in a concerted manner, natural selection did not act on neocortical systems independently of one another, which is a necessary condition for cognition to be massively modular. In this article, I argue that Quartz's argument fails to undermine the massive modularity hypothesis. Copyright 2007 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. © 2006 Cambridge University Press.