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Explanation and Intelligibility (IRB Protocol #12314), Amended March 2013
Grant from UIUC Campus Research Board - $15,620
In previous work (Waskan et al. 2013) on the representational artifact (R-A) conception of explanation, we found that, contrary to received wisdom, laypeople and scientists classify cases as though they regard intelligibility as a crucial component of what makes something an R-A explanation. Indeed, our data suggest that people require of a model that it has actually rendered the target happening intelligible to someone (rather than merely having potential to do so) in order for it to be considered an explanation. We have since expanded our focus to take in the ontic and doxastic senses of 'explanation.' We found, per the graph below, that among scientists intelligibility is regarded as crucial for R-A explanations whereas accuracy is not. Conversely, accuracy is deemed crucial for ontic explanations whereas intelligibility is not. Future research will investigate the types of beings to whom R-A explanations must render intelligible, commonalities and differences between conceptions of explanation across the sciences, whether know-how is constitutive of explanatory understanding, and the relationship between explanatory understanding in science and explanatory understanding in the moral sphere. [Lead Researcher: Jon Waskan]
Impact of Philosophy Education on Critical Thinking in Youth (IRB#13765), Approved April 2013
In 2011 we began Illinois Lyceum, a free, week long philosophy program for high school students. Graduate students teach special topics such as formal logic, the metaphysics of time travel, analogical reasoning, and personal identity. The purpose of Illinois Lyceum, as a public outreach program, is to encourage critical thinking and philosophical reflection for students who would otherwise lack such opportunities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of philosophical engagement on critical thinking and cognitive reflection. To this end, students were given questions from the Law School Admission Test and Cognitive Reflection Test before and after the program (philosophy majors score higher on both tests). Although this study is ongoing, results obtained thus far indicate that philosophical education improves students’ reasoning.
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Knowledge Attribution and Semantic Integration (IRB)#13490, Approved February 2013
Some philosophers have argued that know-how is a distinct form of knowledge from propositional knowledge, i.e., knowledge-that. When one knows-that, the object of one's knowledge is a proposition. On the other hand, knowing-how consists in having certain abilities, skills, or dispositions. Other philosophers have denied that there is a significant distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that, holding instead that the former is a species of the latter. Our research investigates know-how recognition using a semantic integration task (Powell et al., 2012; Waskan et al., 2012). Our aim is to see under what conditions people will remember an agent as knowing-how. [Lead Researcher Ian Harmon]
A Detailed Picture of Philosophy
Of the 500,000+ articles on Philpapers.org, approximately 200,000 have multiple labels (e.g., Conscious & Unconscious Memory / Memory & Cognitive Science). From this data, we constructed a network of philosophy topics, treating topics as related based on the number of articles categorized under both headings. This picture is a representation of this network, generated with the ForceAtlas algorithm, with node color representing group membership (as defined by the modularity measure). [Lead Researcher Andrew Higgins]
[Lead Researcher: Andrew Higgins]
Link to full Paper Categories Image (8.45 MB)Co-Citation in Ontology
We have collected 140,000 citations of 4,700 articles from Philpapers' Objects, Ontology, Persons, and Realism/Anti-Realism categories. This citation data was filtered to only include co-citation (A cites B & B cites A), resulting in 1,770 citations between 377 philosophers. This picture is a representation of this network, generated with the ForceAtlas algorithm, with edge width determined by edge weight and node color representing author significance (as defined by PageRank, red = highest, following by blue, navy blue, and black in descending order of significance). [Lead Researcher Andrew Higgins]
Link to full Metaphysics Co-citations Image (566 KB)
