Joshua Knobe

Infobox Person
name = Joshua Knobe


image_size = 200px
caption =
birth_date =
birth_place =
residence = Chapel Hill, North Carolina
nationality = USA
other_names =
known_for = experimental philosophy
education =
alma_mater =
employer = the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina
occupation = experimental philosopher, professor
title =
boards =
religion =
website = http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/
footnotes =

Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher currently employed as an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina. He is also an author, a blogger, and a frequent guest on the online news, science, and current events channel bloggingheads.tv. According to his curriculum vitae, he received his B.A. at Stanford in 1996 and his Ph.D from Princeton in 2006.

The Knobe Effect

Knobe's work concerns an asymmetry in our judgments of whether an agent intentionally performed an action. To illustrate the effect, suppose that the CEO of a corporation is presented with a proposal that could either help or hurt the environment. He opts to pursue the policy out of a desire to raise profits, but is indifferent to the effect that the action will have on the environment. Although all other features of the scenario are held constant, a majority of subjects judge that the CEO intentionally hurt the environment in the one case, but did not intentionally help it in the other. [Knobe, J. (2003). "Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation". "Philosophical Psychology", 16, pp. 309-324.] Knobe argued that the effect was not produced by pragmatic considerations, but reflected a feature of the speakers underlying concept of intentional action, though his exact views have changed in response to further research.

External links

* [http://philosophy.unc.edu/Knobe.htm University of North Carolina department page for Knobe]
* [http://philosophy.unc.edu/Knobe%20CV%202007.pdf Curriculum vitae]
* [http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ Personal page with a list of published papers]
* [http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html The Experimental Philosophy Page] - by Josh Knobe.
* [http://bloggingheads.tv/search/?participant1=Knobe,%20Joshua List of Video Discussions] on bloggingheads.tv

References