Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Polluting. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo, we have a special guest with us today. Here in the studio with us is Joshua Nobe, who is an assistant professor at Yale University in both cognitive science and philosophy. He is a pioneer of the young but fast growing subfield of philosophy called Experimental Philosophy, or I like its nickname XXVI for Short Tutto.

Welcome. Thanks.

So I was going to try to sum up the the mandate of experimental philosophy, but then I realized that's that's silly when we have an expert in the field right here in the studio with us. So do you want to give us some background on what the field is and what its purposes were?

Experimental philosophy is sort of a new movement within philosophy that has philosophers sort of leaving their armchairs to go out and actually do experimental studies. So in that way, experimental philosophy is kind of reconnecting with an older tradition within philosophy where philosophy was supposed to be concerned with questions about human nature, about how human beings actually think and feel.

So so a lot of those questions in philosophy sort of got branched off into the sciences. So so is that the kind of return that you're talking about returning to its scientific roots? Right.

Exactly. So there used to be the sense of what a philosopher was that a philosopher was supposed to be someone who just thought in a deep and Broadway about how things in general sort of hang together. And then there became a sense maybe at certain times that philosophy should be understood as a highly specific academic discipline, where philosophers could ignore questions about history, about literature or poetry or the sciences, and of the experimental philosophy, is trying to recapture the sort of roots of this philosophical enterprise where it's not sort of this academic discipline siphoned off away from everything else, but more kind of connected with this broader intellectual discourse.

But wait a minute. I just spent a career in science and left it so that I could do armchair speculation about it the right way.

But I think there's obviously a difference between what I'm seeing and the thing that you're worried about. So it's not that experimental philosophy is a movement rejecting the idea of doing anything else other than this kind of work. It's more rejecting the rejection of that sort of work, that is to say, seeing that, among other things, that philosophers could do, one thing that would be valuable is to not just just in your armchair, but get out and get off of with those test tubes.

Right. So let's talk about an example. So so can you give us an example of two of the kind of research that experimental philosophers are interested in doing?

So one kind of question that I've been really interested in is the role of people's moral judgments in their thinking as a whole. So one thing you might think about moral judgment is that it's somehow just the final step in some sort of process so that first we understand basically how a certain situation works. And then once we've basically understood it, then we make a moral judgment about it. But in a series of experiments, I've tried to show that actually people's moral judgments can kind of infuse their whole way of understanding the situations in which they're embedded.

So this there's been a lot of interest recently in what some people refer to as neuro philosophy or neuroethics. Right. So there is a lot of people who are actually doing investigations and how the brain comes up with moral judgment. Now, what would you say, however, to somebody who might make the suggestion then? Well, that's interesting. You know, neurobiology, it's certainly interesting to know how something as important as moral judgment is, is done by the human brain.

But in what sense is that going to inform philosophical questions about ethics? All right.

So there are various different levels that we could think of, a question, a scientific question taking place. So one kind of question that we might wonder about is sort of if people are trying to understand each other's minds, how exactly is that relates not anatomically. So to what degree is it observed by the medial prefrontal cortex versus the temporal parietal junction, the extent that you're wondering about that kind of question? You're not really wondering about a philosophical question. But you might also think that this scientific inquiry will shed light on these deeper questions, like something like fundamentally, what is it that we're even trying to do when we're engaged in the understanding of other people's minds?

Are we engaged in something kind of like a scientific investigation? Is our ordinary way of understanding people's minds somehow fundamentally or deeply different from science? Maybe insofar as we're dealing with those kind of questions, we're not just wondering about a scientific question, but at the same time about something more philosophical.

Let's let's take another more concrete example. Joshua, one of my favorite aspects of your your research portfolio is the work that you've done in which you found that when asking people whether a certain action was was morally blameworthy, whether someone was to blame for their for the consequences of their action, it depends a lot on how the question is framed and that.

People have this feeling that someone, if the world is deterministic and then someone can't really be held responsible for what they do and yet and they'll say that, and yet when you give them a specific example, they'll still hold the person in question morally accountable for their actions.

So I was hoping you could talk about that and then maybe talk about how that relates back to moral philosophy and its traditional sense.

Really an example maybe of what kind of things experimental philosophers do. So there's a kind of traditional question within philosophy. And the question is, if everything is completely determined, can we still be morally responsible for the things that we do? And some people say yes, even if everything was completely determined, we could still be morally responsible, while others say know if everything is determined, then by the fact we can't be morally responsible. And we were thinking is that maybe these two different kinds of views that people have are sort of coming out of two different aspects of our minds to different ways of thinking about the problem.

So we thought in particular, maybe to the extent that we think about things in an abstract, theoretical way, we end up with the idea that you can't be morally responsible if everything is determined. But to the extent that we think about things in a more emotional, concrete way, then we do end up thinking that. So to address this, we ran a study in which all subjects were given a story about this universe universe in which everything is just completely determined.

But then there were two conditions in one condition, and the obstruction participants were just asked if someone is in university, can they ever be morally responsible for anything they do? And then people just said absolutely not. Over 90 percent of subjects said you cannot be more responsible than in the other condition. We estimate differently. We said consider this one guy in Universe Air. His name is Bill. And Bill falls in love with his secretary. So he decides to leave his wife and family.

So he sets up an incendiary device in the basement to burn them all to. So, no, it's completely killed. Is Bill morally responsible for what he did? And there are people overwhelmingly say, yes, this bill is morally responsible for what he did. Wow.

So I'm just curious, did you ask people to try to resolve that? Did you did you point out that glaring inconsistency in their two answers? Oh, yes. They respond. This first study is what we call it between subjects experiment. So half of the participants get one story and half of the other.

Right. Right.

But then we decided, what if we confront people with this fact? So we told people we did the study in which we asked some people this question and some people that question it. But clearly, it can't be that no one is more responsible for anything in university. And Bill is more responsible for what he did. So which do you think is it that people can be more responsible or that they can't?

And the answer is 50 50 was frustrating. That's interesting.

So there is a similar set of studies that have been done mostly by people like John Allen and Joshua Green, who are both cognitive scientists. And they're interesting in the sort of the ever expanding universe of trolly dilemmas that our our listeners probably have already heard us mention a couple of times. So these are difficult situations. If experiments in philosophy where you have this situation where there is a runaway trolley and you know, that is going to hit five people and they're going to die unless you actually pull a lever and there to try to kill somebody else, one person.

And the typical question, of course, there is no would you do it most people if the dilemma is put that way. Answer yes. Which in philosophy is a reflection of a utilitarian kind of reasoning or a consequentialist kind of reasoning. You're essentially you're you're saving five lives and losing one, even though the one you're losing is innocent, but are the other five in theory.

But then, of course, what cognitive psychologists have found out is that and philosophers as well, actually, that if you if you phrase the dilemma differently and the variant being that instead of pulling a lever, you actually had to push somebody in front of the trolley to stop it than most people would say, no, I don't want to do that. Now, that kind of it's a similar sort of of of sort of inconsistency between the two positions to the one that you that you mentioned.

Now, what neuroimaging shows, there is perhaps not surprisingly, that when somebody makes a judgment about the trolley dilemmas that leans toward utilitarianism is using largely the the cortex and therefore the sort of the cognitive areas of the brain, while when the when the problem is posed in more emotional terms, you know, the pushing the person down in front of the trolley, then it's the emotional response system that that takes over. And that's so it's emotional versus a cognitive response.

Now, the interesting thing is, again, that when people are confronted with this sort of logical inconsistency, they start to confabulate. They sort of sort of they're dumbfounded. They don't know what to say about it. Now, the point I want to to arrive at and want to have your opinion about is this. It seems to.

From reading both Height and Greene's research, but I particularly hate that that is position, is that this is a way in which neurobiology shows that there is no such thing as moral realism. In other words, that that all of these talk about ethical judgments and using reason to private ethical judgments and all that sort of stuff, it's all it's it's a nice veneer on the basic fact that we really have inconsistent systems, that emotions take over at some point or another.

And then therefore we simply make up these stories to try to explain to ourselves why we make judgment one way or the other. Do you think that that kind of research does, in fact, have that sort of consequence for positions like moral realism in in ethics, or do that have nothing to do with it?

No, I don't think that just showing that people's emotions are guiding their moral judgments can thereby show that there is no true thing out there that people are somehow tracking by using these emotions. But one way in which experimental philosophy has been sort of trying to get a position of moral realism, that is to see the question as to whether moral judgments can actually be true or are getting at something real out there in the world is by looking at whether ordinary people themselves are moral realists or whether they are relativists.

So a sort of traditional thing that philosophers always said about this problem is that the ordinary view of the sort of folk view of morality is that there are moral truths. And if anyone says the opposite of what you think about morality, they must be saying something wrong. But as experimental philosophers began looking into this problem with a key finding is something very different from that, that it's not the case that everyone is adopting moral realism or believing in moral objectivity.

A lot of times the study simply showing that a lot of ordinary folks are moral relativists, and it's just that it takes a little bit of trickery to see this sort of relativism coming up.

Would they themselves describe themselves that way?

You know, that's an interesting question. If we just ask people, are you a moral relativist, what people would say?

I mean, you'd have to define it for them, I assume. I mean, if you ask them, do you think that some things are just fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong or give them some examples like just anecdotally, I feel like most people would say that there are moral truths.

So, you know, the way that we do it is, again, by sending people to different conditions. So in one condition, people will be taught. Suppose that Masimo kills one of his friends. And now suppose Julia says that what Masimo did is really bad. But suppose I say it's completely fine then just one of us. Julia, I have to be wrong or could we just both be right? Then in a second condition, we say, suppose Massimo kills one of his friends and Julia says what he did was really bad.

But now there's someone off in the Amazonian rainforest, this person, Amazonian rainforest, indigenous traditional culture that has very different ways from our own. They really value this kind of traditions embodied in this culture. They have this sort of warrior ethos that's really different from that that we see in Greenwich Village these days. And now this fellow from the Amazon rainforest says what Massimo did is totally fine. Now, given that Julia and you have these really different opinions, does one of them have to be wrong?

Could they both be right? And then finally, in the third condition, Masimo kill someone. Julia says that it's totally bad what he did. But then there are these extraterrestrial creatures called the penthouse. The penthouse have a completely different culture from ours. They don't care about friendship or love or companionship. All they care about is maximising the total number of equilateral Pentagon staff members.

So I don't know why you phosphors would ever leave your armchair there. I'm thinking up stuff like this all day. I'm sorry. Go on. All right. So this is according to their culture. The most important thing is creative control. If one of them ever gets too old, kind of carry out this task, then they just kill him. And turning into a Pentagon himself, I know they think what Masimo did is totally fine. So it goes I to the Pentagon, of course, killing my friend.

Yes, you do that. It's terrible. Right. So then the question then is if Julia and he have these opposite opinions, then just one of them have to be wrong or could they both be right? We see this gradually increasing tendency to see they could both be right. So if Julian, I have opposite opinions. People say one of us has to be wrong. If Julia and the person from the Amazonian rainforest have opposite opinions, people are split about halfway there right at the midpoint.

If Julia and the Panta have opposite opinions, people just say they could both be right. So maybe ordinary folks don't really think there's kind of a moral objectivity that applies across all people. They just think there's something that I see within our own culture. So that that explains two additional things.

My affinity for your ideas and interests for Pentagon.

So I know that that's very interesting.

So so essentially what you're saying is that therefore the degree of perceived relativism, at least in the kinds of subjects that you guys used, is itself culturally dependent if the culture is different in. Then then it becomes more and more productive, it becomes more and more acceptable as a position to it seems like whether you believe that there is morality is objective. What these some of these studies seem to indicate is it depends on what other possibilities you're considering. If I'm just considering the difference between me and Julia, then no.

But if I'm really considering these other possibilities that are really, really different, if I can open up my mind to really different ways of life, then to start to see it as relative. So some studies have tried to figure out in other ways what happens if we look at other possibilities. So, for example, suppose you give people math problems where the only way to solve the math problem is to consider a whole range of different possibilities. The people who get those math problems right are more likely to give relativist answers.

And the people who get those math problems wrong are more likely to give the kind of objective distance.

Oh, that's interesting. That actually, it reminds me of another interesting finding. Again, back to the trolley problems kind of experiments where it turns out that people that have better cognitive tasks also tend to be more utilitarian. And people that are less good at tasks tend to be more sort of a deal anthologist or, you know, more and more the reactions are more based on an emotional and emotional response. And so, in fact, you can you can decrease the degree of utilitarian tendency in some body if you ask him to consider it the moral dilemma at the same time that you're involving him in a cognitive tasks, that's what you're distracting the person.

And so there is that that same sense, the same part of the brain, apparently that does math also does you treat any type of ethical reasoning then? Therefore, there is a tradeoff essentially. So you become less good at it and you revert toward an emotional and emotional kind of response.

So that's interesting.

So that means that depending on how you put the question, depending on what else the person is doing and all that, the moral judgment can change significantly to a really nice way of getting this kind of process that you're talking about in the domain of free will is just by changing the font in which the question is asked. So you see, consider this deterministic universe. Now, can anyone in that universe be morally responsible for what they do? If you read it out in a really easy to read font like, say, Garamond, people go to really simply and then they just give their sort of immediate intuitive response and they see then the person is morally responsible.

But suppose you read it in a more difficult to read that some complicated Gothic font that triggers this kind of difficult, concerted, careful thinking. Then people say that if you're in a moral in a completely deterministic universe, you're not morally responsible for anything we can do that sort of triggers this more careful kind of thought, those people to a different kind of response on these moral questions.

But I'm still a little bit confused about the approach that you're taking here, because it I mean, you're you're it seems a little bit like moral philosophy as a whole.

Like I mean, so you're getting results about whether people think that there are moral truths. But philosophy and theory should be trying to tell us whether there are, in fact, moral truths, not just, you know, what percentage of the population thinks there are. Right.

Right. So one of the reasons that we're interested in this is just because we're interested in questions about human nature. We just want to understand human beings and how they think. But there's also this other aspect that you're getting at, the idea that maybe by understanding how people think we can get more insight into what really is the right answer to this question.

Tell me about that.

So then the idea there would be if we get a better understanding of these different psychological processes and we know which psychological process leads to which kind of answer, then we can engage in a further kind of investigation about which of these processes we should really put our faith in. So which of these processes should we really trust in these kind of cases?

So it's sort of a similar if I if I read you correctly, is in some sense similar to, say, a somebody who is a physiologist who is interested in how vision works or hearing works or something like that and say, well, OK, so a human being as a part of being a having being a human being by nature, we have five senses which work in a certain way. Now, if I were to decide what is the best way to navigate the particular environment, should I rely more on the certain conditions on vision or olfactory responses or whatever?

And it turns out that, well, given the kind of animal that we are, if there is enough light around, you probably should be, in fact, relying on vision. But in fact. But if but if the environment is different, you probably should be relying on something else. And then there are some things that you really shouldn't rely too much on, for instance, of fact, because it's it's very well known that compared to a lot of other animals, human beings are awful in terms of being able to to sense their their olfactory environment.

Is that the sort of thing that I'm getting part of what you're saying there? Yeah, exactly. So in the kind of case that you're describing, we the question we're trying to get an answer to isn't a question about our minds or our senses. It's a question about the external environment. But by studying our minds. During our sensory capacities, we can get a better understanding of how the external world actually looks. Another, I guess that I'm thinking of it, another analogy might be research in the cognitive scientists.

Science is also on the concept of intuition. So, you know, you hear this thing by many people. You know, I'm a very intuitive person or that that moment is a very intuitive individual in terms of what it turns out that you can do research on intuition and unreliability of intuition. And there's no such thing as an intuitive person because intuition is domain specific. So if you are if you spent countless hours playing chess, then your intuitions about chess are very good.

But your intuition about something else might be completely normal or, you know, perfectly average. But the idea being that, again, this is something that has been mysterious for a long time, you know, it's an intuition thing that that to some extent over the human history has even taken sort of mystical aspects. And it turns out, well, this is simply some subconscious parallel processing by the brain. And it turns out that there are rules by which it operates and there are domains in which it is more reliable, domains in which is not right.

So it's a similar situation.

Well, I just one last question about the relevance to philosophy. So you said that the these kind of experiments can can point to which intuitions are actually reliable and which were just misleading us. What actually is the answer for for an experiment like the one you were describing?

When we have these different parts, we rely on a different context. What does that tell us about the right answer philosophically?

You know, it's a very difficult question to answer, but there's been some really interesting research on it just in the past two years. So consider that case I give you. I said imagine a completely deterministic universe. Can you actually be morally responsible in it? There are two different processes, a sort of abstract theoretical reflection in a kind of immediate emotional response to different answers. So some people argue there's a specific reason to think that the one we should trust is our emotional response, not our capacity for abstract, theoretical perfection.

The way they argue for this is this way. They ask people other questions about these scenarios other than the question about whether someone can be morally responsible. So, for example, they might ask consider these to this scenario in this deterministic world is the thing that the person does affected by that person's beliefs and intentions and decisions, or is it sort of independent of those? So philosophers think maybe that if something's completely deterministic, it can still depend on your beliefs or still depend on your decisions.

But it turns out that in the case where people are relying on this sort of abstract reflection, they tend to say, no, it doesn't depend on your on your beliefs and decisions. In the case where they're relying on the sort of concrete emotional response, they tend to say yes. So if we start out with these two things, this empirical finding that people gives a certain answer when they're using a certain psychological process and this sort of philosophical conclusion that one of these answers is the right one, we can use that to figure out which kind of psychological processes, the trustworthy one, the one we should be putting our faith in.

Interesting. So this relates a little bit to a question that several of our readers on the rationally speaking blog had for you. And I'm sure you've gotten this before. The question was just about the the name or the categorization of your field as being a part of philosophy. And so, I mean, my reaction to when I first heard about experimental philosophy was that it just seemed oddly named, like it seemed like psychology. It seemed like it was studying people's reactions to and thoughts about and perceptions of philosophical questions.

And if I could be a bit cheeky for a minute, I would compare it to, you know, the human mind is famous for making certain errors when it tries to think about various logical questions. And there are researchers who study that and those errors. But we don't call that experimental logic. We call that psychology. Right. So is that not analogous? Analogous.

So I wouldn't think of experimental philosophy as an attempt to say that this stuff really falls within this certain kind of clear domain of philosophy. Rather, it seems like an attempt to just get people to think less about that whole distinction, this idea that it's really important to divide everything into these two different disciplines, to close certain things, philosophy, certain things, psychology, certain things, anthropology and so forth. Rather, it's sort of an attempt to go back to a kind of more maybe 19th century vision, according to which there are just questions.

We should just go after those questions in any way that we can. So maybe a really nice analogy is with the movement of behavioral economics. So these were people in economics and in psychology who just wanted to pay less attention to the idea that economics and psychology are supposed to be these distinct disciplines. And they formed a kind of field in which the collaborators go after these questions that were. At the intersection of psychology and economics, similarly, experimental philosophy is sort of a field or a movement composed of people in various different disciplines who are just not interested in thinking that much about the distinction between these disciplines.

It's actually interesting that you mention 19th century going back to the 19th century. There was a term that was used until fairly recently, actually the middle part of the 20th century to indicate something along the lines of what you're talking about. And it comes from a Latin word, not surprisingly. And it's the word is Sentier spelled very similar to science, its CEO and TIAA. And the meaning of Synthia is, in fact, knowledge in the sense in the broad sense of rational knowledge.

So the idea there was even a journal actually published in Europe until several years ago called Sentier, and the idea was to put together philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and scientists to address whatever question it is that they cross those boundary boundary lines. So that actually is a concept then. You're right. It does go back to the 19th century pretty much. And but it is following these years. And probably the reason is finding it is precisely because of something you mentioned briefly earlier, which is this perhaps necessity, certain, a tendency of modern academic academia to specialize.

Right.

I mean, these days, you can't be a professional philosopher, it seems, unless you spend, you know, your entire lifetime analyzing a small part of us, of a small book by a smaller philosopher published 500 years ago and analogies.

Similarly, in science, you know, most scientific careers are actually built on very, very specific problems that are really of interest directly to only a very small number of people. And but the reason for that, of course, is because that way you can make an original contribution. Right. And therefore you can publish papers in publishing papers, of course, is what gets your tenure and what gets you. Tenure is the holy grail of academic life. So you think that in some sense the problem that this kind of approach, like experimental philosophy or similar ones might or behavioral economics, for instance, might encounter is simply an institutional one.

That is, it's going to be difficult to convince not only your colleagues in your department, but more importantly, your dean or your provost or the president, your university, that this is, in fact, a more reasonable, more interesting way to go about it.

You know, so far, things are moving in the right direction. So my position, for example, that I was hired into isn't just, say, in the Department of Philosophy, it's in an interdisciplinary program in cognitive science where cognitive science is this field that includes philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and the students who major in cognitive science have to take courses in all of these in these various different disciplines in order to graduate. Maybe if we're lucky, things will move increasingly in that direction where instead of people being divided up in this careful way among different disciplines, everyone can kind of work together to go after a shared set of problems, at least the kinds of questions that I've been addressing so far.

The literature on those questions hasn't at all been confined to one particular discipline or to another.

But the various people have been written on and they've been in conversation with each other, have been from all sorts of different disciplines, such, as you mentioned a little earlier, this idea of human nature and how philosophers are interested in human nature or at least should be interested in human nature, because, after all, philosophy is deals with what it means to be a human being. Now, is it my impression or recently, especially in certain areas, at certain quarters in academia, there is actually a fundamental skepticism about even the existence of such thing as human nature, which which honestly, as a former biologist, I'm kind of baffled by my typical response when somebody says I don't believe in human nature, is it really?

So when was the last time you went out with a chimpanzee for that? For a date? But nonetheless, what's your take on human nature in general? I mean, what is it as the professor, former professor of biology, maybe you should say something about that topic. So let's hear from you. What do you think about that?

Well, so, of course, I I'm not suggesting there is such a thing as human nature, as some kind of essence that it's only passed by a human being to the world mean being or that it's some some kind of mystical, certainly not a mystical essence of any sort. But on the other hand, biological species are significantly different from each other because of the environment in which they live and because of the genetic makeup that that they have right now.

Of course, these are matters. I mean, it is clearly our genetic makeup. It's much more similar to that of a chimpanzee than it is to that of a whale or something. And the same goes for our environment. But it seems to me that the claim that any any species in general, but particularly human beings, do not have some.

Kind of fundamental way of being that it's different from other species, even closer to the species flies in the face, in the face of the facts, because our cultural environment is radically different from that of any other species on the planet. Surely that is in part the result, at least of the fact that we also have a different genetic makeup, for one thing, that our genetic make up make it makes it possible for us to have large, complex brains and to spend an inordinate amount of our energy feeding those brains.

I mean, about 30 percent of human metabolism goes into feeding the brain. That's a that's a huge figure that it's certainly not the case for all of the other close relatives to our species. So on based on that kind of considerations, I would say, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Now, the fact that this variation within human beings and between cultures or different times, that's obviously also the case. But it doesn't seem to me the variation negates the existence of something fundamental, on top of which this variation is exercised.

So as a philosopher and in particular as an experimental philosopher who just said that he's interested in human nature, what's your take on that?

Well, the specific kind of phenomenon that I have been investigating have this quality of being extremely robust across these various different kinds of variations. So some of the experiments that I have been working on or some of the phenomenon that we've been trying to uncover have this quality that they're very surprising. They don't at all seem to be sort of obvious or intuitive. We find them among American adults, but we also find them among four year old children, among people from India taking the questionnaire in India, among people who have massive damage to one or another brain region, among people who have Asperger syndrome.

It seems like these phenomena aren't just local to some particular kind of cultural context, but a reflection of something deep about just what kind of species we are, what kind of creature we are. So it seems as though some of the discoveries that are coming out of experimental philosophy don't have this quality of being just discoveries about how people are, you know, right now in a certain kind of cultural context, but about how human beings fundamentally understand their world.

Right.

So that's that's where the difference lies, right. I mean, both in evolutionary biology and especially when we're talking about humans and more generally in, you know, anthropological studies, there's always the question is always how to distinguish between local variation and cultural variation and something more fundamental. And again, as I said a minute ago, it seems to me bizarre that we too often fall into these these to one of these two camps. On the one hand, people who absolutely say that there is a fundamental human nature and that cultural variation is irrelevant or inconsequential.

That seems to be not acceptable to a lot of cultural variation out there. And it's very important. It does shape a lot of aspects of what it means to be a human. And then at the opposite extreme, you have people who say, well, it's all about cultural variation in biology, doesn't matter. And these discussions tend to go on for a long time in a fairly sterile fashion. I mean, as it turns out, not only I was a biologist, but my my field of research was gene environment interactions, which is exactly what philosophers call nature nurture questions.

And of course, I did not work on human beings. I worked on plants because they have the event that you can clone them and you can grow them under control conditions. Right. You can cross them in whatever whatever way you want. You can't do that with human beings. Which means, of course, that the question of the specific contributions of genetics and environment in humans is always going to be fairly much open to to to the discussion. It's not going to be easy to settle it experimentally.

But the fact that it is has been settled experimentally. Pretty much every other species that we know seems to me a pretty good suggestion that, yeah, we're not that different in that respect, that there is a contradiction between the two.

I just like to ask one more question about the effect of experimental philosophy, because it seems like a big part of your driving force.

Your raison d'être is challenging the traditional way that philosophy has been done. And so I'm curious what kind of reaction you have gotten from the establishment, so to speak, whether it's seen as, oh, here's this this useful addition to what we've been doing or whether it's actually been seen as a substitute for the traditional methods of philosophy. What's been your experience?

Well, it's been very polarizing so far in the world of philosophy more generally with some people being really excited about it and thinking this is something that could be really valuable and make an important contribution, along with other methods to philosophical research. And other people are thinking this is never going to help anything. This is all a complete waste of time. But one thing I really value about the discipline of philosophy is that although some people disagree and think that this is a mistake, they don't agree in a kind of reflexive, automatic way, but always in a sort of more thoughtful.

Effectively so that if you read the various papers arguing that all of the things I've done are useless, these papers are written in a really, I think a very different way from the way that would be characteristic of a political debate. They carefully explain exactly what it is that I've argued for and then lay out systematic arguments that it will in no way help anything.

Isn't that worse for you, though? I'm much more meticulous dismantling.

I mean, you know, I feel like there's something really wonderful about the existence of a discipline like that where everything is up for questioning. And even if someone wants to challenge the whole way, once you've been proceeding, people will consider it maybe justified that it's wrong. But still to it up, take that idea on board. Is something worth arguing about that is very bighearted of you.

Almost too good to be true. I have a hard time believing that. But I mean, the experience actually you're talking about is similar to the one that I've had moving from the from the sciences to the to philosophy in my bad days. I I think that what's actually happened is that the now I am too much of a philosopher for my science colleagues and too much of a scientist, my philosophy colleagues, and nobody's happy. But in reality, in fact, I have to say that I've been welcome in in the philosophical community precisely because there is this interest about everything.

You know, people are generally interested in considering other points of view, even though they might disagree vehemently on what you do or what or your particular conclusions. They do it in a way that is, first of all, tries to understand what you're doing and second of all, tries to come up with the best possible argument for why you were wrong. Now, you know, in philosophy one on one, one of the first things you learn is that you always are supposed to come up with to address the most charitable interpretation of your opponent's argument.

Right. You don't want to I mean, the straw man is a fallacy and philosophers take that very seriously. You don't you don't oversimplify your opponent just so that you can knock them down. You're taking as seriously as possible, possibly more seriously than even something I can think possible. And then you go out and try to knock it down.

So we're almost out of time. But I just wanted to give you this opportunity to tell us if there's any recent work that you're you're in the middle of now that hasn't been already chewed up by the by the mainstream media. I'd love to hear what you have in the works.

Oh, well, right now I'm working with the Council on the Concept of Happiness. So the question is, what is people's ordinary intuition about what it means to be truly happy and what we find is something interesting. So we are wondering, do people think that what it means to be truly happy is just to have a certain kind of psychological state, like to have a certain kind of emotion? Or is it that when people see that someone is truly happy with something more, they mean something like this person really has a good life, whether they're living in the right way.

So we ran stories about people's ordinary judgements of being happy. Questions like what it means to say if someone is truly happy and what it means to sit someone's truly unhappy. And we find in this case, this is completely opposite results. And if you ask whether someone's truly happy, then people will be very reluctant to see that someone's truly happy if the person has a really terrible, vapid life. But if you ask whether someone's truly unhappy, then it's has seems to have very little to do in any way with any kind of moral judgment or value judgement you're casting on them.

It's just a matter of what kind of emotions you have. So someone who has really negative emotions is feeling unhappy, will be judged to be an unhappy person. But someone who has really positive emotions won't necessarily judge to be judged to be a happy person. Rather, you'll only be judged to be a happy person if people think you really have a good life.

To some extent, that difference might be due to the fact that in English the word happiness has particular kinds of connotation which are more restrictive than in other languages. I mean, as you know, the ancient Greeks were referring to the concept eudaimonia, which is occasionally translated, translated as happiness. But it doesn't really quite translate to that. The majority statement by you that money was, in fact more of a sort of a balanced, you know, ethically positive life.

He wasn't talking about just being happy emotionally, for instance, for instance. So could it be and similar differences also in other languages mean some other European languages? You know, romance languages have different words for those kinds of different connotations.

To what extent perhaps this is the fact that that if you are somebody, is this person happy and and versus is this person unhappy? Instead of getting the opposite, the logical opposite, you get something completely different, perhaps because they, in fact, are the concepts behind those words are very different than we just would need more words essentially to explain what it is that we're thinking.

You know, that's a wonderful suggestion. So about other kinds of investigations that we've seen. We've always we've done it sort of cross linguistically looking at. Judgments people make when they answer the question in English, but also in many other languages. But this is just stirring up. We haven't tried that, but if we tried it in Italian, do you think we'd get the same result? Maybe we could try it in languages that aren't even closely related to English, right?

Yeah, that would be a I'd be very curious to see what what happens in that case.

I hate to cut you off because I'm so interested in the subject, but we are plum out of time on this section. So we are going to wrap up this part of rationally speaking and move on to the rationally speaking.

Welcome back. Every episode, Juliani, I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our fancy. But when we have a guest, as today's case with Joshua Nobe, we have the guest having the pleasure of doing the pick. So, Joshua, what did you come up with?

So I'm thinking of two different books that might initially seem very, very different from each other, but I think might both be related on a deeper level and could sort of contribute a skeptic picks. So one is a book by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called The Genealogy of Morals. And it's a book about why it is that people have the moral judgment as they do. What are sort of the hidden psychological underpinnings of people's moral judgments. And the other is a book by my wife, the indie rock musician Allena Simonne, and it's sort of a memoir of her life in the world of indie rock called You Must Go and Win, which sort of gets at the sort of hidden and irreverent psychological underpinnings of life as an indie rock songstress.

All right.

That sounds like an interesting connection between the two. Well, first, nature is relevant to almost everything anyway if we're talking about morality. So that's that's a pretty good connection.

Did the genealogy of morals influence your path at all? Absolutely. So when I was when I was before I went into academia, I had this picture of what philosophy was is a picture that came out of works like this, works from the past, like commissions. And then when I went into academia, I discovered that philosophy as it was being done then was very different in certain respects from this sort of older tradition. But I had a kind of ritual conception of what philosophy should be about and to sort of revive this older sense of what the sort of philosophical enterprise was all about.

So sort of what I what I and other people involved in this experimental philosophy movement wanted to do was to go back to that sort of more traditional conception that we see in people like each other.

So interesting, because the experimental philosophy crowd, as far as I've managed to gather, is quite young, isn't that right? You're the one you're advocating a return to the old days and the philosophy. It's wonderful.

It's a young crowd and probably a lot of them don't listen to indie rock, don't they?

Oh, there's a connection there. In fact, maybe there's a deeper connection in that. My wife actually created a music video for experimental philosophy. It's called the Experimental Philosophy Anthem. And the music video features a picture of an armchair gradually going up in flames.

So beautiful. We'll to link to that. We will make it we will do a link to it on the website and start the podcast.

Well, I'm afraid we're all out of time. So I just want to say thank you again, Joshua, for taking the time to visit us and speak to us. It's been such a pleasure. I just want to remind all of our listeners that the rationally speaking podcast is brought to you by the New York City skeptics. And we encourage you to go check out our website, NYC Skeptic's dot org, where you'll find all of our lectures and upcoming events like Stepto camp.

And while you're there, consider becoming a member. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.