The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mind & Language, 2009
The manifest dissociation between our capacity to make moral judgments and our ability to provide justifications for them, a phenomenon labeled Moral Dumbfounding, has important implications for the theory and practice of moral psychology. I articulate and develop the Linguistic Analogy as a robust alternative to existing sentimentalist models of moral judgment inspired by this phenomenon. The Linguistic Analogy motivates a crucial distinction between moral acceptability and moral permissibility judgments, and thereby calls into question prevailing methods used in the study of moral judgment. Indeed, the judgments that are the focus of most current empirical work in moral psychology are not proper targets of scientific study.
Particularism, Analogy, and Moral Cognition
2010
Particularism' and 'generalism' refer to families of positions in the philosophy of moral reasoning, with the former playing down the importance of principles, rules or standards, and the latter stressing their importance. Part of the debate has taken an empirical turn, and this turn has implications for AI research and the philosophy of cognitive modeling. In this paper, Jonathan Dancy's approach to particularism (arguably one of the best known and most radical approaches) is questioned both on logical and empirical grounds. Doubts are raised over whether Dancy's brand of particularism can adequately explain the graded nature of similarity assessments in analogical arguments. Also, simple recurrent neural network models of moral case classification are presented and discussed. This is done to raise concerns about Dancy's suggestion that neural networks can help us to understand how we could classify situations in a way that is compatible with his particularism. Throughout, the idea of a surveyable standard-one with restricted length and complexity-plays a key role. Analogical arguments are taken to involve multidimensional similarity assessments, and surveyable contributory standards are taken to be attempts to articulate the dimensions of similarity that may exist between cases. This work will be of relevance both to those who have interests in computationally modeling human moral cognition and to those who are interested in how such models may or may not improve our philosophical understanding of such cognition.
The Open Psychology Journal, 2010
In this article, it is argued that intuitive judgments of immoral events result from an automatic process where perceived events are matched against mentally represented event prototypes. The proposed cognitive underpinnings of such a process are tested in two experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that typical immoral events require shorter judgment times than atypical events. This typicality effect implies that immediate moral responding depends on the similarity of an encountered event to a pre-existing mental prototype. Experiment 2 showed that priming representations of immoral events facilitates the responding only to other events violating the same moral value, and not to events related to other moral values. This finding provides further support for the notion that moral reactions rely on pre-existing schematic mental representations, and suggests that these representations are stored in associative networks with values as a basis for categorization. It is concluded that the results concord with and extend recent work that places moral cognition in a dual-process perspective.
Moral Valence and Semantic Intuitions
Despite the swirling tide of controversy surrounding the work of Machery et al. (Cognition 92:B1-B12, 2004), the cross-cultural differences they observed in semantic intuitions about the reference of proper names have proven to be robust. In the present article, we report cross-cultural and individual differences in semantic intuitions obtained using new experimental materials. In light of the the fact that Machery et al.'s original materials incorporated elements of wrongdoing but did not control for their influence, we also examined the question of whether the moral valence of actions described in experimental materials might affect participants' responses. Our results suggest that uncontrolled moral valence did not distort participants' judgments in previous research. Our findings provide further confirmation of the robustness of cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions and strengthen the philosophical challenge that they pose.
In A Theory of Justice (1971), and in some earlier work too, John Rawls somewhat quickly suggests an analogy between moral philosophy and linguistics. Moral philosophy, the thought seems to be, is in the business of studying our moral sense in a way that is importantly analogous to the way in which linguistic theory-at least since Chomsky-is in the business of studying universal grammar, and so moral philosophers would be wise to model their research on that of the successful linguist. This thought is in some respects rather natural, and it promises great theoretical payoffs-in fact, the minute one thinks about it, interesting questions and suggestions pop into one's head, and this in itself is some evidence of the theoretical potential of this analogy.
Hacking Moral Code: Can Cognitive Stimulation Impact Moral Semantic Processing?
Harvard University Extension School, 2023
Can targeted cognitive stimulation impact the semantic processing of moral words like “fair?” When individuals apply a word like “fair” to different situations, do they make these judgements consistently or can they be altered with the activation of different cognitive functions within the brain? Recent research has demonstrated that semantic processing, in which the brain attributes meaning to words, may be composed of numerous cognitive functions also used in other mental processes, and that processing different kinds of words and concepts requires different component functions. Perhaps this theory can be extended to the meaning of individual words; that a word’s distinct meaning may come from a unique “package” of cognitive components. Thus, if the cognitive component “package” used by an individual to process a word is somehow modified, then the individual will interpret the meaning of that word differently. The researcher hypothesized that exposing individuals to cognitive stimulation activities, such as word analogy exercises, would activate cognitive functions related to perceiving equality and – in a phenomenon known as cognitive process priming – encourage the individuals to apply the word “fair” to more options presented in a spectrum of possible distributive justice outcomes for different business ethics dilemmas. In two “pre- and post-test” design experiments, each involving roughly 120-participants, results indicate significant word analogy effect on the application of the word “fair” in business ethics dilemmas related to intellectual property and company co-founder disputes. In the first experiment, using a quasi-experimental design with no randomized question order or control, intellectual property case responses (Dilemma 1) produced statistical scores of p=.021 and Cohen’s d = -.185, while company co-founder cases (Dilemma 2) produced p=.045 and Cohen’s d =-.155. In the second experiment, fully randomized in question order and with a control group, Dilemma 2 responses produced p=.040 and Cohen’s d = -.323 for all six trials, and scores of p=.015 and Cohen’s d = -.572 for the first three trials. Meanwhile, Dilemma 1 responses were significant, p=.040 and Cohen’s d = 1.063, only in the second trial. This data suggests that the word analogies did impact the semantic processing of the word “fair,” but only in the ethics dilemmas making cognitive demands similar in structure to those made in the analogy exercises, and that the effect dissipates quickly. If this phenomenon can be demonstrated for other cognitive functions and moral concepts, it could lead to new techniques in semantic measurement and computational modelling of complex social behavior, and new protocols for calibrating ethical discourse in public and professional forums. This phenomenon could also provide the foundation for a new paradigm of psychological warfare.
Proponents of the linguistic analogy (Dwyer, 2009; Mikhail, 2011) suggest that methodologies originally developed for investigating linguistic grammar can also be fruitfully applied to the empirical study of moral grammar: the causal and intentional representations of moral events which – according to the linguistic analogy – drive moral judgments. In the current study we put this claim to the empirical test. Participants were presented with moral dilemmas which previously have been shown to implement a central principle in moral judgments: the principle of double effect (PDE). Participants responded to by and in order to probes to assess causal and intentional representations of this principle. Results show that these linguistic probes do not relate to moral judgment in the manner predicted by proponents of the linguistic analogy and moral grammar. Although the linguistic analogy is a theoretically rich framework, the procedures posited to give it empirical traction require revision.
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 2017
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the trolley problem, mirroring differences in their wrongness judgments: they described direct harm with a single causative verb (Adam killed the man), and indirect harm with an intransitive verb in a periphrastic construction (Adam caused the man to die). Experiments 1b and 2 separate physical causality from moral valuation by varying whether the victim is a person or animal and whether the harmful action rescues people or inanimate objects. The results show that people's moral judgments lead them to portray a causal event as either more or less direct and intended, which in turn shapes their verb choices. Experiment 3 finds the same basi...
Ethical intuitionism and the linguistic analogy
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2017
It is a central tenet of ethical intuitionism as defended by W. D. Ross and others that moral theory should reflect the convictions of mature moral agents. Hence, intuitionism is plausible to the extent that it corresponds to our well-considered moral judgments. After arguing for this claim, I discuss whether intuitionists offer an empirically adequate account of our moral obligations. I do this by applying recent empirical research by John Mikhail that is based on the idea of a universal moral grammar to a number of claims implicit in W. D. Ross's normative theory. I argue that the results at least partly vindicate intuitionism.