Abstract:Chairing an academic conference, especially one like DiGRA, is a great honor and a great responsibility: it grants you a fair amount of power, at least for a short amount of time. I thought I would take advantage of that power and this platform to share my personal thoughts and opinions on what it means to run an academic conference in this field. In doing so I hope to clarify some of the things that, to me at least, were opaque about the process of chairing a conference. While I knew that chairing was a lot o… Show more
“…There is reason to think that these simulations can be made even more successful by embedding them in richer narrative contexts (Zagal ). Insofar as the perspectival scenarios of interest to philosophers can be embedded within VR worlds, the possibility exists for us to revive the perspectival experiment in this new form and to derive genuinely probative data from them.…”
This article criticizes what it calls perspectival thought experiments, which require subjects to mentally simulate a perspective before making judgments from within it. Examples include Judith Thomsons violinist analogy, Philippa Foots trolley problem, and Bernard Williamss Jim case. The article argues that advances in the philosophical and psychological study of empathy suggest that the simulative capacities required by perspectival thought experiments are all but impossible. These thought experiments require agents to consciously simulate necessarily unconscious features of subjectivity. To complete these experiments subjects must deploy theory-theoretical frameworks to predict what they think they would (or ought to) do. These outputs, however, systematically mislead subjects and are highly prone to error. They are of negligible probative value, and this bodes poorly for their continued use. The article ends with two suggestions. First, many thought experiments are not problematically perspectival. Second, it should be possible to carry out "intheir-shoes" perspectival thought experiments by off-loading simulations onto virtual environments into which philosophers place subjects.
“…There is reason to think that these simulations can be made even more successful by embedding them in richer narrative contexts (Zagal ). Insofar as the perspectival scenarios of interest to philosophers can be embedded within VR worlds, the possibility exists for us to revive the perspectival experiment in this new form and to derive genuinely probative data from them.…”
This article criticizes what it calls perspectival thought experiments, which require subjects to mentally simulate a perspective before making judgments from within it. Examples include Judith Thomsons violinist analogy, Philippa Foots trolley problem, and Bernard Williamss Jim case. The article argues that advances in the philosophical and psychological study of empathy suggest that the simulative capacities required by perspectival thought experiments are all but impossible. These thought experiments require agents to consciously simulate necessarily unconscious features of subjectivity. To complete these experiments subjects must deploy theory-theoretical frameworks to predict what they think they would (or ought to) do. These outputs, however, systematically mislead subjects and are highly prone to error. They are of negligible probative value, and this bodes poorly for their continued use. The article ends with two suggestions. First, many thought experiments are not problematically perspectival. Second, it should be possible to carry out "intheir-shoes" perspectival thought experiments by off-loading simulations onto virtual environments into which philosophers place subjects.
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