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This is Philosophy Bytes with me, David.
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Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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When philosophers use thought experiments, they usually assume that their own responses are typical and that others will share their intuitions. Edouard Macherie has explored cultural differences in response to thought experiments and come up with some interesting results. Sometimes responses are more or less universal, but sometimes they're not.
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Edouard Machoury, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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Thanks for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to talk to you as well as your listener today.
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We're talking today about variations in response to thought experiments. Before we begin, do you have a neat definition of what a thought experiment is?
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Oh, defining a thought experiment is of course not easy. It's part of philosophy. So just like everything else, it is bound to be controversial. But still, I believe we can have a simple description of what one does when one engages in a thought experiment. One imagines a situation that's not actual. That's why it's a thought experiment and not a real experiment. And one thinks about what would happen if in that situation and what would happen in that situation then matters for some scientific or philosophical purposes. It's worth noting that thought experiments have been in philosophy for centuries. In fact, in Plato we already have thought experiments and they've been very important in science as well. Einstein and many others have been very fond of thought experiments.
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And we're talking today about philosophical, not scientific thought experiments. Presumably the way they're supposed to work is that the philosopher is comes up with an imaginary hypothesis and believes that their intuition is going to be shared widely by everybody else.
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That's right, there's been an assumption, but it's hard to find anyone expressing this assumption really very clearly and explicitly. But I think there's been an assumption that philosophers reaction to their own thought experiments would be very widespread. They would be found among their colleagues, their friends, the common folk, but also across cultures. There wouldn't be striking variation. And that's been a controversial assumption.
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Right, so you have been looking at this and you've been investigating whether thought experiments, which tend to be invented by philosophers in the Anglo American tradition, whether their intuitions are actually shared in other parts of the world. So we'll get to some examples in a moment, but just I'm interested factually, how many countries have you tested intuitions in?
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So we started small. My first paper had two countries, you know, China in Hong Kong, more precisely in North America, the USA. But since then we've expanded to 20 or 30 countries in very different parts of the world. I think we've worked in all continents in like 20 or 30 languages. We've worked with small scale societies in Peru and Ecuador, you know, like days out of any big cities. We've worked in enormous cities like Beijing and New York. So all cultural environment with farmers in Morocco and educated people in Paris. So we have now quite a diverse group of people.
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When you went into this, did you come with any preconceived idea of what you would find? Did you think you would find shared intuitions or were you expecting to find divergence?
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C
We did expect to find divergence and we were hoping to find divergence. It's an empirical question. So we have not always found divergence and often we find actually sometimes similarities and we've been surprised to find similarities. Often we find divergences in the ways that we did not expect to find divergences. So it's been always kind of a curious set of findings, sometimes in line with our expectations, sometimes not.
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Let's get concrete and talk about some specific examples. One of the most famous examples is the gettier problem. Before we get to your finding, you're going to need to explain to us what a gettier problem is.
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C
It is quite a simple situation. So in philosophy according to anyways, where philosophers like to tell their own history, for a very long time philosophers have thought that to know something requires having a belief in that thing, a true belief in that thing. So belief must be true, must be in line with the facts, and also you must have some justification for your belief. And getier is this incredibly clever philosopher who now decades ago, wrote a very short paper that provided a counterexample to this idea. So getier case is a situation where someone has a belief in something, that belief happens to be true and that person has a good justification for having that belief, but that person doesn't have any knowledge. So the examples that actually I find quite telling is the following. 1. John goes to the train station and John sees a clock on the wall and the clock says 3pm so John forms a belief that it's 3pm and it is 3pm so in that situation, John believes that it is 3pm his belief is true because it is 3pm and he's got a good reason for having that belief. After all, he sees the clock and the clock says 3pm but now it turns out the clock is broken. At any other time the clock would have said 3pm so John got it right by luck. Right. The question is, does John know that it's 3pm well, philosophers have come to the conclusion, no, he doesn't know. And that's meant to be a counterexample to the view that knowing is having a true justified belief.
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So there it's justified, it's true, it's a belief. But Gettier said one doesn't know it, One doesn't know it's 3pm so tell me whether people around the world share that intuition, whether they believe that Gettier's intuition is the right one, that John doesn't know the time.
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So what happened is that most philosophers are actually all philosophers agreed with Getty. It was actually a revolution in philosophy and it took decades for people to start wondering, well, is that really true? After all, what do lay people think about this matter? And what do people across languages and cultures? No one even bothered looking. And so me and my colleagues were the first one to look at it in great depth of the matter. And we came to the study with the expectation that there would be variation in that case. And we were thinking that it's kind of strange that the philosopher's way of thinking about knowledge would be shared by everyone in the world. We expect variation across languages. In France we have Connetre and Serres and there's tremendous variations. So we expect variation. And in maybe 20 countries, 25 languages, languages as diverse as Japanese, Mandarin, Bengalis, Spanish, a bunch of small scale society languages in South America, we found actually very little variation in the way people think about the Getty case. People tend to give the same answer as philosophers, which I was tremendously surprised.
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So that's fascinating. Getty was sort of vindicated. Let's turn to another thought experiment. Saul Kripke has one about names involving Kurt Godel, who's not an imaginary figure, the real Kurt Godel, who is one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century. Explain the thought experiment.
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So it's a beautiful thought experiment. It's an experiment about how proper names, namely the name Godel, works. Imagine the following. Godel, who is, as you said, a famous mathematician and is believed to have shown that arithmetic is incomplete, which is a complicated mathematical theorem. Now imagine that in fact Godel did not prove that mathematics is incomplete. He just stole the theorem from someone called Schmidt. Now, Schmidt died in Vienna under mysterious circumstances and no one ever found out that Godel has actually stolen the theorem and not proved it. Now everyone knows Godel still, the theorem publishes, it becomes extremely famous. One of the great mathematicians, so to speak, of the 20th century. And everyone believes that Godel is the man who demonstrated that arithmetic is incomplete. Now when someone in China says Godel must have been a tremendous mathematician, is he speaking about Godel, the man who stole the theorem, or is he speaking about Schmidt?
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Now, Kripke thought that he was speaking about Godel, the man who stole the theorem. What do most people think?
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That was actually one of the first findings. Widely replicated, extremely robust result. With children and grown up, there's cultural variation. People in the west, people in North America, not everyone, but most people in North America tend to say yes. When the speaker uses a proper name, Godel, he's speaking about a man called Godel, namely the man who stole the theorem in that sort experiment. However, when we've done it in Asia, in Japan and in China, as I said in China with both grownups and like 5 to 7 year old, you find the opposite answer there. People say the proper name is used to talk about Schmidt.
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Do you have any explanation why the answer is no?
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It is actually a very surprising finding. So we had some, some explanation. In the original paper we speculated that causation is very salient to Westerners and there's a causal link between the man who was called Godel and our users of the word Godel. Right. So there's a historical chain of connection between speakers and there's some research suggesting that maybe causation is less salient in Eastern Asia, in China and Japan. So that was a possibility, but it's just a speculation. We really haven't tested that explanatory hypothesis.
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But it radically undermines Kripke's thesis because suddenly it makes us think, well, if half the world is not thinking the way Kritkean Westerners are thinking, why should we take kids Kripke's intuition seriously?
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That's right. That was the whole point of the project, was actually to challenge the intuition and the role of that thought experiment in philosophizing about proper names. I do think it's a very serious challenge and in fact philosophers have reacted to that challenge in exactly that way. I think there was a consensus that judging by the number of responses and criticisms, that this is actually a very serious challenge to the kind of argument that Kripke has put forward.
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How geographically wide have you tested that one? Is that an East Asian phenomena or does that replicate in different parts of the world?
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It is an East Asian phenomenon. We've tested it widely in Asia and you find it again and again in Japan and China. We've tested it in a bunch of other countries and they tend to be more of Western pattern with A bit. Some variation.
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Third example, Hillary Putnam and twin Earth one. Once again, you better explain what this involves. It involves water on Earth and something which is called water on a planet which is just like Earth.
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That's right. So as your listener will know, water on Earth is made of H2O. So two molecules of hydrogen, one molecule of oxygen. Now, just imagine that there's another planet which is very, very, very far away from our planet. And in that planet there's a liquid that for all intents and purposes, for what you can see for all its users, works exactly like water. People drink it, it's used for hydration, and it's used to grow plants. It's transparent, it feeds lakes and oceans. So it really looks like water. But somehow, when you analyze this liquid, it's made of another molecule, which Putnam calls the xyz. That was a little bit of a lazy name, but he just called it xyz. So we have the same surface properties, same user, same looks, same appearances, but different chemical structure. And the question has been put in many different ways. It's a little bit complicated, but the question, the way Putnam put the question at the beginning is when people in this planet use the word water, do they mean the same as what we mean when we use the word water?
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And Putnam said they don't.
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That's correct. Putnam said they don't. And the conclusion that Putnam wanted to make with his thought experiment was that meaning depends on facts which are outside the speaker facts in the world, namely the structure of the substances.
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Same question again. Is that intuition shared cross culturally?
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No, that intuition varies enormously. This is a very, very labile intuition. You, in contrast to the crypt where it's really China and Asia. That's a bit different here. It's a very different intuition. It's a very, very fragile intuition. You can manipulate it very easily. You can get people to switch back and forth between the two intuitions. So that's an intuition that's not only not universal, but also, even among Westerners, quite fragile.
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And when you say you can manipulate it by framing the question in different ways.
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Correct. That's one way you can do that. You can ask different type of question about water, but also you can set the setting in a slightly different context. You can wonder whether it's lawyers who are asking the question, whether it's lawyers for legal and patenting purposes, whether it's scientists, whether it's everyday speakers. And this very simple manipulation of the question will lead people to give very different answers. So Putnam thought he was getting at a very deeply rooted intuition. But in fact, what we've learned over the last, I would say, 10 years of research on that thought experiment is that his intuition is very shallow. It's easily manipulable. The concern here for philosophers is that how much philosophy should we build on this kind of intuition? And my answer is very little.
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I was going to ask you that at the end, but let's just talk about a fourth example now, which perhaps the most famous thought experiment in moral philosophy, which is the trolley problem. In the trolley problem, in one case, you've got a train which is out of control. It's going to kill five people who are tied to the track. You can flick a switch and turn the train down a spur where unfortunately, one person is tied to the track. So you have the choice between killing five or turning the train and killing one. In another trolley problem, the train is once again out of control. It's going to kill five people tied to the track. This time you're standing on a footbridge. You can push a very large man over the footbridge, he will tumble down and stop the train from killing the five people. And the philosopher's intuition is that in the first case it's okay to turn the train to save the five, but in the second case it's not acceptable to push the large man to save the five. Although in both cases you're killing one to save five. So there's the intuition, how wide is that shed?
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C
So the original research back in the 2000s suggested it's a universal intuition. So at the beginning, Mac Houser and Fari Cushman had this extraordinary website where they were collected intuitions from all over the world, and they reported finding very little differences. But since then, I think we've discovered that there are actually variations. One of them, which actually we should have expected is, is a gender variation. So women and men do not react to the thought experiment in the same way. Men are more likely to actually push the large person on the foot bridge onto the tracks than women. And in many ways we should have expected that. We know that men and women, at least in the moral domain, have different intuition. We know also they have different attitude toward risk and so on and so forth. Another one, which I did work on personally, was about age, or more exactly, about generations. And the question we were interested in is, does the intuition about the footbridge case vary depending on when you are born? So not your age. So we control for age, but which generation you belong to. And as I always joke, the conclusion is that if you should avoid food bridges, if they're a young person on the footbridge, because I like it, to push you to save five people. So the finding is that people who are born in the 1950s, 1970s are substantially less likely to think that it's permissible to push the large person to save five people than people born in the 1990s. And it's hard to know how far the trend will go, but the increase remains constant.
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So just to be clear, those who are born in the 1990s, as they age, they don't change their view.
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That's right. It's not an edge effect, it is a generation effect.
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So that's very intriguing. Do you have an explanation for that?
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So, I mean, it does fit with broader research on changes in norms among generation, that people in the 1950s, 1970s were more committed to deontological norms, to the idea that what you ought to do is determined by norms that tell you, well, you should not take someone's life. And that's very simple. Then you're not going to push a large person of the bridge onto the tracks. And this kind of commitment to that kind of very simple norm seems to have actually been eroded, leaving maybe room for other forms of moral justifications, consequentialist reasoning. It's a speculation, but it fits with a broader literature on the matter.
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So you found a gender effect and you found a generational effect. What about a cultural effect?
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So that's harder to find. There is work by Josh Green, philosopher's life psychologist Josh Green at Harvard. It's unpublished, so I think it should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think it's interesting. Work with Buddhist monk, I think in Tibet, if memory helps, suggesting that Buddhist monks are actually willing to push the large person in the Foodbridge case, which of course should be extremely puzzling because of course Buddhist monks are very reluctant to cause harm. You know, they know they're going to harm their karma by doing that, but they think it is not only permissible, it's a require thing to do. In the thought experiment of the food breach case. So very different from the reaction of most people in the west who think, no, it's actually the wrong things to do, it's impermissible.
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You mentioned that philosophers have used thought experiments all the way back to Plato, Plato's Clave, the Ring of Gyges and so on. Thought experiments and philosophy are inextricably linked. Is your work a sustained attack on this way of doing philosophy, that we should be skeptical about?
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C
Thought experiments yes, that's a conclusion that I came to after maybe two decades of empirical work on thought experiments. Now, there are a few thought experiments that seems to be very robust, and I think those are good for thought. One might say they're good materials for thinking about philosophical problems. But most thought experiments, in fact, are bad tools for doing philosophy. And the conclusion, as I've come to, is actually that we should try to use thought experiments as little as we can. And when we want to use a thought experiment, it's our duty to check that it's a deeply rooted reaction to the world.
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A
Is that then, your advice to those doing philosophy who come up with thought experiments that they need to check that these aren't local intuitions that they share or that their mates share? Somehow they've got to find out. I mean, it can't be easy, but somehow they've got to find out whether this is a universal intuition.
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C
That is indeed my advice and it's been actually my attitude that it's somewhat irresponsible. In fact, it's a strong word. But I do want to say it. It's irresponsible to speculate about what everyone's reaction might be to a case and to build very deep philosophy on that without checking.
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You've looked at lots of thought experiments. Now you must have an idea of what the ingredients are that make a thought experiment robust.
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Yes, I have some sense of what actually makes them fragile and so what makes them robust. One of them is the appeal to unusual aspects of life. Our concepts are really tailored to deal with everyday life. As soon as we deploy them in these weird situations, we should be very concerned about whether we are getting frail. The trouble, of course, that most of the experiments in philosophy are about weird situation intentionally. Right. Because somehow we want to think about the borders. It's a bit of a catch 22 situation. You see, we want to be thinking about these unusual situations, but our concepts are not really trustworthy when we try to deploy them in those situations. And so many factors are going to be influencing how we react to the situation. Your gender, your risk aversion, your culture, weird stuff in your languages, and so on and so forth. I think that's one of the many features, but I think maybe the most important one.
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A
Eduard Mashoui, thank you very much indeed.
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C
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
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You've been listening to Philosophy Bites. This episode was made in association with the Institute of Philosophy and supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations for more Philosophy Bytes. Go to philosophybytes. Com.