The Boulder Experimental Philosophy Lab

We're currently funded under the Innovative Seed Grant Program and a Eugene M. Kayden Research Award.


Research in Progress

Wrongness and Judgments about Killing and Letting Die (in progress): One hypothesis about intuitions relevant to the killing/letting die debate is that they are driven by ethical judgments, rather than being used as the basis for ethical judgments. Current practices in a priori and experimental philosophy are unsuited to test this hypothesis; it is likely that standard philosophical experiments test theory-laden conscious judgments about killing, rather than intuitions (and we have produced some data that supports this hypothesis). We have developed developed computer-assisted experimental techniques to examine the factors that influence intuitions (rather than reasoned-to judgments) about killing and letting die. We've run four studies so far, and are in the middle of a fifth. The results should be available soon.

Moral Twin Earth (study currently in progress): The Moral Twin Earth style of thought experiment can be used to refute almost any naturalistic account of moral properties. It is based on intuitions about disagreement. We suspect that these may be produced by unreliable mechanisms which are purely sensitive to superficial features that suggest disagreement whether or not disagreement has actually occurred.

The Mechanism Behind Gettier Intuitions (in the planning stages): There are some reasons to suspect that Gettier intuitions are either wholly unsuitable for the role they normally play (undermining claims about the JTB analysis of knowledge) or are poor evidence about knowledge. Certain explanations of why this is are un-testable using current practices in experimental philosophy. Our research applies sophisticated tools for the analysis of unconscious cognition to test these suspicions about Gettier intuitions.


The Experimator
Software written and designed by Brian Talbot for doing on-line reaction-time studies using Flash. This allows fast development of experiments without requiring much technical background, rapid iteration, and can be used in combination with Amazon's MTurk for access to a large body of research participants.

Click here for a zip file containing everything you need to use the Experimator and more. This has the Experimator itself ("Experimator.swf"), a helper file that writes the Experimator's results to files on your fileserver ("path-to-php.php"), a sample html file that runs the Experimator ("index_FOR_EXPERIMATOR.html") (which works well with Amazon's MTurk), some template files that you can use if you run experiments through MTurk (all of which start with "Mturk"), and instructions for using the Experimator.

Please note: I'm a philosopher, not a writer-of-instructions. The instructions are accurate, and I hope they are helpful, but I can't make any promises in that regard. You will probably need some basic understanding of internet stuff to use the Experimator. Please feel free to email me if you need help or clarification.