Joshua Knobe Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill knobe at email dot unc dot edu

Online Experiments

Participate in a series of online experiments on the concept of intentional action.

Papers on Intention and Intentional Action

These papers form a pretty unified research program. For a brief introduction, see Knobe (2003a) (written for an audience of analytic philosophers) or Knobe (2005) (written for an audience of cognitive scientists). For a summary and review of all the papers listed here, see Knobe (2006).

Knobe,J. (2005). Theory of Mind and Moral Cognition: Exploring the Connections. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 357-359.

Knobe, J. (2003a). Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis, 63, 190-193.

Knobe, J. (2006). The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psychology. Philosophical Studies. 130: 203-231.

Knobe, J. (2004). Intention, Intentional Action and Moral Considerations. Analysis, 64, 181-187.

Leslie, A., Knobe, J. & Cohen, A. (2006). Acting intentionally and the side-effect effect: 'Theory of mind' and moral judgment. Psychological Science, 17, 421-427.

Knobe, J. (2004). Folk Psychology and Folk Morality: Response to Critics. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24.

Knobe, J. (2003b). Intentional Action in Folk Psychology: An Experimental Investigation. Philosophical Psychology, 16, 309-324.

Knobe, J. and Burra, A. (2006). Intention and Intentional Action: A Cross-Cultural Study Journal of Culture and Cognition, 6, 113-132.

Knobe, J. and Burra, A. (2006). Experimental Philosophy and Folk Concepts: Methodological Considerations. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 331-342. [A reply to comments from Alfred Mele, Fred Adams, Gilbert Harman, Adam Morton, Liane Young et al. and Charles Kalish]

Knobe, J. & Mendlow, G. (2004). The Good, the Bad and the Blameworthy: Understanding the Role of Evaluative Reasoning in Folk Psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24, 252-258.


Malle, B. F. & Knobe, J. (1997). The Folk Concept of Intentionality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 101-121.

Reprinted in W. Lesko (ed.) Readings in Social Psychology: General, Classic and Contemporary Selections. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Malle, B. F. & Knobe, J. (2001) The Distinction between Desire and Intention: A Folk-Conceptual Analysis. In B. F. Malle, L. J. Moses, & D. A. Baldwin (Eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Papers on Causation

Knobe, J. & Fraser, B. (2008). Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment: Two Experiments. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Psychology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 441-448.

Cushman, F., Knobe, J. & Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (forthcoming). Moral Appraisals Affect Doing/Allowing Judgments. Cognition.

Knobe, Joshua. (2005). Cognitive Processes Shaped by the Impulse to Blame. Brooklyn Law Review, 71, 929-937.

Papers on Moral Responsibility

Nichols, S. & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions. Nous, 41, 663-685.


An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way. For responses to this paper, see Robert Kane (2005), Eddy Nahmias (2006), Adina Roskies (2006), Ernest Sosa (forthcoming) and Manuel Vargas (2006)

Joshua Knobe and John Doris. Strawsonian Variations: Folk Morality and the Search for a Unified Theory.
Draft of a paper to appear in J. Doris et al. The Handbook of Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A great deal of fascinating research has gone into an attempt to uncover the fundamental criteria that people use when assigning moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it seems that most existing accounts fall prey to one counterexample or another. The underlying problem, we suggest, is that there simply isn't any single system of criteria that people apply in all cases of responsibility attribution. Instead, it appears that people use quite different criteria in different kinds of cases.

Other Papers on Folk Psychology

Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz. (forthcoming). Intuitions about Consciousness: Experimental Studies. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.


When people are trying to determine whether an entity is capable of having certain kinds of mental states, they can proceed either by thinking about the entity from a functional standpoint or by thinking about the entity from a physical standpoint. We conducted a series of studies to determine how each of these standpoints impact people’s mental state ascriptions. The results point to a striking asymmetry. It appears that ascriptions of states involving phenomenal consciousness are sensitive to physical factors in a way that ascriptions of other states are not.

Knobe, J. (2007). Reason Explanation in Folk Psychology. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 90-107.

Knobe, J. & Roedder, E. (forthcoming). The Ordinary Concept of Valuing. Philosophical Issues.

Knobe, J. (forthcoming). Folk Psychology: Science and Morals. In Hutto, D. & Ratcliffe, M. (ed.) Folk Psychology Reassessed. Kluwer/Springer Press.

Other Philosophical Publications

Knobe, J & Leiter, B. (forthcoming). The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology In Nietzsche and Morality Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(To download the paper, follow the link and then click on one of the images at the bottom of the page.)

Argues that the results of recent psychological studies support a broadly 'Nietzschean' approach to moral psychology. These results suggest that character traits really do exist and have an impact on the overall course of people's lives. However, it seems that people's beliefs regarding abstract moral principles actually have extraordinarily little impact on their behavior. There certainly are correlations between behaviors and beliefs in abstract moral principles, but these correlations do not seem to be best explained in terms of the moral principles guiding the behavior. Rather, it seems that people first perform the behaviors and then develop principles to justify the decisions they have already made.

Knobe, J., Olum, K. & Vilenkin, A. (2006). Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57, 47-67.

Co-authored with two physicists. Argues that the universe contains infinitely many other planets exactly like this one — complete with infinitely many people exactly like you, reading infinitely many websites exactly like this one.

Knobe, J. (2005). Ordinary Ethical Reasoning and the Ideal of 'Being Yourself.' Philosophical Psychology, 18, 327-340.

Knobe, J. (forthcoming). What Is Experimental Philosophy? The Philosophers' Magazine.

Knobe, J. (2007). Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance. Philosophical Explorations, 10: 119-122.

Written for a symposium on experimental philosophy. Argues that recent work in experimental philosophy is best understood, not so much as addressing the sorts of questions that first came to prominence within the analytic tradition, but rather as addressing more traditional sorts of philosophical questions -- the sorts of questions that preoccupied Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche, and others.

Papers on Folk Explanations of Behavior

These papers present a theory about how people ordinarily explain behavior. For a relatively accessible introduction, see Knobe and Malle (2002).

Knobe, J. & Malle, B. F. (2002). Self and Other in the Explanation of Behavior. Psychologica Belgica, 42, 113-130.

Malle, B.F., Knobe, J. & Nelson, S. (forthcoming). Actor-Observer Asymmetries in Explanations of Behavior: New Answers to an Old Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Malle, B. F., Knobe, J., O’Laughlin, M., Pearce, G., & Nelson, S. (2000). Conceptual Structure and Social Functions of Behavior Explanations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 309-326.

Malle, B. F. & Knobe, J. (1997) Which Behaviors Do People Explain? A Basic Actor-Observer Asymmetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 288-304.

Reviews

Shaun Nichols. Sentimental Rules (Oxford University Press, 2004), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming.

Johannes Roessler and Naomi Eilan (ed.) Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2003), Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming.

Responses to my work

Fred Adams and Annie Steadman. (2004). Intentional Action in Ordinary Language: Core Concept or Pragmatic Understanding? Analysis, 64, 173-181.

Fred Adams and Annie Steadman. (2004). Intentional Action and Moral Considerations: Still Pragmatic. Analysis, 64, 268-276.

Mark Alicke. (forthcoming). Blaming Badly. Journal of Cognition and Culture.

Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely. (2007). An Anomaly in Intentional Action Ascription: More Evidence of Folk Diversity. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society.

Gilbert Harman. (2006). Intending, Intention, Intent, Intentional Action, and Acting Intentionally: Comments on Knobe and Burra. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 269-276.

F.A. Hindriks. (forthcoming). Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry. Philosophical Quarterly.

Antti Kauppinen. (2007). The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy. Philosophical Explorations, 10: 95-118.

Bertram Malle. The Moral Dimension of Intentionality Judgments. Technical Reports of the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, No. 04-2, Eugene, Oregon.

Bertram Malle. (2006). Intentionality, Morality, and their Relationship in Human Judgment. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 87-113.

Edouard Machery. (forthcoming). Understanding the Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Philosophical and Experimental Issues. Mind and Language.

Reply: Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian (forthcoming) Is the Trade-off Hypothesis Worth Trading For? Mind & Language.

Ron Mallon. (forthcoming) Knobe vs. Machery: Testing the Trade-Off Hypothesis. Mind & Language.

Hugh McCann. (2005). Intentional Action and Intending: Recent Empirical Studies. Philosophical Psychology, 18, 737-748.

Roblin Meeks. (2004). Unintentionally Biasing the Data: Reply to Knobe. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24, 220-223.


Alfred Mele. Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions. In B. F. Malle, L. J. Moses, & D. A. Baldwin (Eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Alfred Mele. (2003). Intentional Action: Controversies, Data, and Core Hypotheses. Philosophical Psychology, 16, 325-340.

Thomas Nadelhoffer. (2004). On Praise, Side Effects, and Folk Ascriptions of Intentionality. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24, 196-213.

Thomas Nadelhoffer. (2004). Blame, Badness, and Intentional Action: A Reply to Knobe and Mendlow. Forthcoming in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24, 259-269.

Thomas Nadelhoffer. (forthcoming). Bad Acts, Blameworthy Agents, and Intentional Actions: Some Problems for Juror Impartiality. Philosophical Explorations.

Jennifer Nado Effects of Moral Cognition on Judgments of Intentionality. Conditionally accepted at British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Dana Nelkin. Do We Have a Coherent Set of Intuitions About Moral Responsibility? Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 243-259.

Shaun Nichols and Joseph Ulatowski. (2007). Intuitions and Individual Differences: The Knobe Effect Revisited. Mind and Language, 22: 346-365.

Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian. (forthcoming). The Folk Strike Back; Or, Why You Didn’t Do It Intentionally, Though It Was Bad and You Knew It. Philosophical Studies.

Lawrence Solan. (forthcoming). Where Does Blaming Come From? Brooklyn Law Review.
(To download the paper, follow the link and then click on one of the images at the bottom of the page.)

Chandra Sripada . The “Deep Self” Model and asymmetries in folk judgments about intentionality and responsibility.

Annie Steadman and Fred Adams. Folk Concepts, Surveys and Intentional Action. Proceedings of the international conference “Intentionality, deliberation and autonomy – the action theoretic basis of practical philosophy” Sienna, Italy.

Steven Sverdlik. (2004). Intentionality and Moral Judgments in Commonsense Thought about Action. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology,24, 224-236.

Jason Turner. (2004). Folk Intuitions, Asymmetry, and Intentional Side Effects. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology,24, 214-219.

Eric Wiland. (forthcoming). Intentional Action and 'In Order To.' Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

Jen Wright and John Bengson. Asymmetries in Folk Judgments of Responsibility and Intentional Action.

Julie Yoo. (2004). Folk Psychology and Moral Evaluation. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology,24, 237-251.

Liane Young, Fiery Cushman, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Marc Hauser. (2006). Does emotion mediate the effect of an action’s moral status on its intentional status? Neuropsychological evidence. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6, 291-304.

Unpublished Manuscripts

Folk Judgments of Causation


A brief paper that presents a new hypothesis about the cognitive mechanisms underlying ordinary causal judgments.

Christopher Hitchcock and Joshua Knobe. Cause and Norm.


A longer paper that explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying causal selection and asks whether the intuitions generated by these mechanisms might be serving any philosophically defensible purpose.

Dean Pettit and Joshua Knobe. The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment.


Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.

David Pizarro, Joshua Knobe and Paul Bloom. College students implicitly judge interracial sex and gay sex to be morally wrong

Links

• My beloved wife Allie

• The Experimental Philosophy Page

• Dan Moller. (forthcoming). Love and Death. Journal of Philosophy.
  [Doesn't have anything to do with me or my work; just a paper that I find extremely profound and worth reading.]