Category Archives: Empirical Studies

Culturally Variant Intuitions

A session at the recent APA Pacific on “Multicultural Epistemology” (featuring Jason Stanley and Edouard Machery, among others) has got me thinking about culturally variant intuitions. Recent evidence from experimental philosophy has indicated that respondents in East Asian countries tend to have different reactions than their Western counterparts to cases such as “The Magistrate and the Mob,” or Kripke’s Gödel scenario. A recurring question at the APA session concerned what these differences ought to mean for philosophers working in the given areas. Stanley argued that rather than refuting a prevalent methodology that begins from philosophers’ intuitions about cases, cultural variances simply provide us with a wider data set to be explained. Machery in turn presented his research-in-progress suggesting that cross-cultural intuitions about Gettier cases exhibited far more similarity than previous work by experimental philosophers has suggested. Continue reading →

Neuroimaging Study of Korean vs U.S. Moral Thinking

Stanford scholar shows Koreans and Americans tackle moral dilemmas using different brain regions … offers first look at neural differences between cultural groups solving tricky moral problems.

Someone pointed me to the story, published here (thank you, Annette Bryson!). The study, which is hyperlinked in the story, is available here for free download (last I checked). I have no real comment on it yet, but thought some blog readers who are interested in empirical studies about moral thinking in Confucian societies might find it interesting, assuming, as I do, that Korea has a society that still remains heavily influenced by its history of Confucianism.