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 studiesas represented in our samplesuccessfully 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.

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Many philosophers hold that stakes affect ordinary knowledge ascriptions. Here’s a version of a pair of cases aimed at supporting this: Bob and his wife are driving home on Friday and considering whether to stop at the bank to deposit a check. The lines at the bank are very long and so Bob considers coming back on Saturday. In the low stakes version, nothing of importance hinges on whether the check is deposited; in the high stakes version, it is very important that the check be deposited. Bob’s wife asks whether the bank will be open on Saturday. Bob says he drove past the bank last Saturday, and it was open. However, his wife points out that banks sometimes change their hours. Bob says “I know the bank will be open tomorrow”. In the low stakes case, many philosophers maintain that Bob does indeed know that the bank will be open; in the high stakes case, these philosophers maintain that Bob is ignorant – his statement that he knows the bank will be open tomorrow is false. These philosophers also maintain that this pattern of judgments is what we would expect from competent speakers confronted with this and similar cases (e.g., Cohen, 1999, 2013; DeRose, 1992, 2009; Fantl and McGrath, 2002; Nagel, 2008; Rysiew, 2001; Stanley, 2005).\ud Though many philosophers agree that stakes play a role in ordinary knowledge ascriptions, there is disagreement about what explains this. One view, epistemic contextualism, holds that “to know” is a context sensitive verb and that the truth conditions for knowledge ascriptions can vary across conversational contexts (e.g., DeRose, 2009). For instance, Bob’s statement “I know the bank will be open tomorrow” can be true in low stakes contexts and false in high stakes contexts. Another view, interest-relative invariantism, denies that “to know” is a context sensitive verb and that the truth conditions for knowledge ascriptions vary according to conversational contexts. Instead, cases like the Bank cases show that practical factors—i.e., stakes—play a distinctive role in determining whether the knowledge relation obtains (e.g., Stanley, 2005). Yet another alternative, which we’ll call classical invariantism, denies that “to know” is a context sensitive verb and that practical factors, such as stakes, play a direct role in determining whether the knowledge relation obtains. Instead, stakes affect knowledge ascriptions only by affecting our assessment of factors that have traditionally been taken to constitute or be necessary for knowledge, such as e.g., belief, quality of evidence, etc. (e.g., Bach, 2005; Weatherson, 2005; Ganson, 2007; Nagel, 2008). If this is right, then the role of stakes in knowledge ascriptions fails to motivate such surprising views as epistemic contextualism or interest-relative invariantism. Naturally, epistemic contextualists and interest-relative invariantists deny this, claiming that even when the factors that have traditionally been taken to constitute or be necessary for knowledge are held fixed, stakes continue to play a role in ordinary kn...

In a heated debate about the proximity of COVID-19 herd immunity, White House health advisor Dr Scott Atlas proclaimed 'You're supposed to believe the science, and I'm telling you the science' 1 . A group of infectious disease experts and former colleagues from Stanford, however, publicly criticized Dr Atlas, who is a radiologist, for spreading 'falsehoods and misrepresentation of science' through his statements about face masks, social distancing and the safety of community transmission 2 . In the 2020 pandemic crisis, all eyes turned to scientific experts to provide advice, guidelines and remedies; from COVID-19 alarmists to sceptics, appeal to scientific authority appeared a prevalent strategy on both sides of the political spectrum. Please see the Supplementary Information for a short commentary on how the current work might relate to the COVID-19 situation.A large body of research has shown that the credibility of a statement is heavily influenced by the perceived credibility of its source [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Children and adults are sensitive to the past track record of informants [11][12][13][14][15][16] , evidence of their benevolence toward the recipient of testimony [17][18][19] , as well as how credible the information is at face value 20,21 . From an evolutionary perspective, deference to credible authorities such as teachers, doctors and scientists is an adaptive strategy that enables effective cultural learning and knowledge transmission [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] . Indeed, if the source is considered a trusted expert, people are willing to believe claims from that source without fully understanding them. We dub this 'the Einstein effect'; people simply accept that E = mc 2 and that antibiotics can help cure pneumonia because credible authorities such as Einstein and their doctor say so, without actually understanding what these statements truly entail.Knowing that a statement originates from an epistemic authority may thus increase the likelihood of opaque messages being interpreted as meaningful and profound. According to Sperber 29 , in some cases, incomprehensible statements from credible sources may be appreciated not just in spite of, but by virtue of their incomprehensibility, as exemplified by the speech of spiritual or intellectual gurus (the 'Guru effect'). Here, we investigate to what extent different epistemic authorities affect the perceived value of nonsensical information. To this end, we contrasted judgements of gobbledegook spoken by a spiritual leader with gobbledegook spoken

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In contemporary Western moral philosophy literature that discusses the Chinese ethical tradition, it is a commonplace practice to use the Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation of the English term moral. The present study provides some empirical evidence showing a discrepancy between the terms moral and daode. There is a much more pronounced difference between prototypically immoral and prototypically uncultured behaviors in English (USA) than between prototypically bu daode 不道德 and prototypically bu wenming 不文明 behaviors in Mandarin Chinese (Mainland China). If the Western concept of immorality is defined in contraposition to things that are matters of etiquette or conventional norms and thus tied to a more or less tangible moral / conventional distinction, then we are dealing with a different structure in Mandarin Chinese-the prototypically bu daode and bu wenming behaviors seem to largely overlap. We also discuss whether bu lunli 不倫理 and bu hefa 不合法 can be considered adequate candidates for translation of immorality and we answer in the negative.

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator

In this paper we report a study conducted in Mongolia on the scope of morality, that is, the extent to which people moralize different social domains. Following Turiel's moral‐conventional task, we characterized moral transgressions (in contrast to conventional transgressions) in terms of two dimensions: authority independence and generality of scope. Different moral domains are then defined by grouping such moral transgressions in terms of their content (following Haidt's classification of morally relevant domains). There are four main results of the study. First, since all five Haidtian domains were moralized by the Mongolian participants, the study provides evidence in favour of pluralism about moral domains. However, the study also suggests that the domain of harm can be reduced to the fairness domain. Furthermore, although the strong claim about reduction of all moral domains to the domain of fairness does not seem to hold a significant number of participants did indicate considerations of fairness across domains. Finally, a significant amount of participants moralized conventional transgressions a la Turiel, but it did not reach a statistical significance.