Eric Schwitzgebel

The Unreliability of Naive Introspection

We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. Examples highlighted in this paper include: emotional experience, peripheral vision, and the phenomenology of thought. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward.

In-between Believing

For any proposition p, it may sometimes occur that a person is not quite accurately describable as believing that p, nor quite accurately describable as failing to believe that p. I describe such a person as in an ‘in-between state of belief’. I argue for the prevalence of in-between states of believing, and assert the need for an account of belief that allows us intelligibly to talk about in-between believing. I suggest that Bayesian and representationalist approaches are inadequate to the task, and that a Rylean dispositional account of belief might do the trick.

Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White

In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black-and-white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming presume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black-and-white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black-and-white was connected with this change in media technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the phenomenology of our own dreams is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be.

The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with ones mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior.

Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors

If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10–15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists.

Do We Dream in Color? Cultural Variations and Skepticism

In the United States, the rise and fall of the opinion that we dream in black and white coincided with the rise and fall of black and white film media over the course of the 20th century, suggesting that our opinions about the coloration of our dreams are subject to cultural influences. This study generalizes that conclusion cross-culturally. Three groups of Chinese respondents, similar in age but differing in history of colored media exposure, were given questionnaires replicating those of Middleton (1942) and Schwitzgebel (2003). As expected, the groups with longer histories of colored media exposure reported more colored dreaming.

Gradual Belief Change in Children

Major cognitive developments are unlikely to happen instantaneously. Consequently, children must frequently pass through periods of being ‘in between’ genuine understanding and failure to understand. The current literatures on false belief understanding and object permanence largely fail to recognize the importance of such in-between states of understanding. Recent philosophical accounts of belief also fail to make sufficient room for such in-between states. An approach based on Ryle’s [1949] account of belief is recommended and is compared with some other approaches, including the competence/performance approach and contextualist approaches.

Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from 1942

In the 1940s and 1950s many people in the United States appear to have thought they dreamed in black and white. For example, Middleton (1942) found that 70.7% of 277 college sophomores reported “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams. The present study replicated Middletons questionnaire and found that a sample of 124 students in 2001 reported a significantly greater rate of colored dreaming than the earlier sample, with only 17.7% saying that they “rarely” or “never” see colors in their dreams. Assuming that dreams themselves have not changed over this time period, it appears that one or the other (or both) groups of respondents must be profoundly mistaken about a basic feature of their dream experiences.

Ethicists' courtesy at philosophy conferences

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving ones seat tidy). By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash.

A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box

I offer here an account of what it is to have an attitude. I intend this account to be entirely general — to include all the “propositional attitudes” (believing, desiring, intending, fearing, hoping …), the “reactive attitudes” (resenting, appreciating, forgiving, being angry with …), and other types of attitudes that appear to be directed toward people, things, or events (loving Tim, trusting Elena, hating jazz, having a “bad attitude” about school, valuing kindness over intelligence, approving of the President’s foreign policy decisions …). I will argue that to have an attitude is, primarily, (1) to have a dispositional profile that matches, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a stereotype for that attitude, typically grounded in folk psychology, and secondarily, (2) in some cases also to meet further stereotypical attitude-specific conditions. To have an attitude, on the account I will recommend here, is mainly a matter of being apt to interact with the world in patterns that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of having that attitude.