thereissomethingsurprisinghere-universityofarizona.docVIP

Draft of November 16, 2005 Intuitions and individual differences: The Knobe effect revisited* Shaun Nichols and Joseph Ulatowski Philosophy, University of Utah Joshua Knobe has produced perhaps the most baffling set of data in experimental philosophy. Indeed, it’s one of the most intriguing data sets in recent psychology. He finds that people’s intuitions about whether an outcome was intentionally produced seem to vary depending on the moral status of the outcome itself (Knobe 2003a, 2003b, forthcoming). These striking results have attracted attention from numerous different fields of inquiry, including action theory (Mele 2003, McCann forthcoming), social psychology (Malle forthcoming), moral psychology (Hauser forthcoming), philosophy of law (Nadelhoffer forthcoming a), philosophy of language (Adams Steadman 2004a, 2004b, forthcoming), and developmental psychology (Leslie et al. forthcoming). What has not yet emerged, though, is a satisfying explanation of the phenomenon. In our view, the literature makes apparent that all of the prominent explanations have serious shortcomings. The puzzle persists. In this paper, our goal is to present and defend a new proposal intended to explain part of the phenomenon that Knobe has uncovered. Our proposal will be that “intentional” is ambiguous. But in order to bring out the strengths of the account, we first need to do a good deal of stage setting. We will begin by describing Knobe’s basic findings. We will also review the three main accounts of the Knobe effect and the deficiencies with those accounts. Then we’ll describe an experiment we’ve just conducted that suggested to us the semantic ambiguity hypothesis. The key finding is that there seem to be stable individual differences in intuitions about the Knobe cases. This provides the basis for pursuing the hypothesis that “intentional” is ambiguous. The existence of robust individual differences in intuitions also points to some significant implication