Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher currently employed as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina. He is also an author, a blogger, and a frequent guest on the online news, science, and current events channel bloggingheads.tv. He received his B.A. at Stanford in 1996 and his Ph.D from Princeton in 2006.
The Knobe Effect
Knobe's work concerns an asymmetry in our judgments of whether an agent intentionally performed an action. To illustrate the effect, suppose that the CEO of a corporation is presented with a proposal that could either help or hurt the environment. He opts to pursue the policy out of a desire to raise profits, but is indifferent to the effect that the action will have on the environment. Although all other features of the scenario are held constant, a majority of subjects judge that the CEO intentionally hurt the environment in the one case, but did not intentionally help it in the other.1 Knobe argued that the effect was not produced by pragmatic considerations, but reflected a feature of the speakers underlying concept of intentional action, though his exact views have changed in response to further research.
External links
References
- ^ Knobe, J. (2003). "Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation". Philosophical Psychology, 16, pp. 309-324.
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