Joshua Knobe
American philosopher
Joshua Michael Knobe (; born 1974) is an American experimental philosopher, whose work ranges across issues in philosophy of mind and action and ethics. He is Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Yale University. He is known for his work on the "Knobe effect" and use of experimental methods to understand personal reactions to moral dilemmas.
Education and career
Knobe received his B.A. at Stanford University in 1996 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2006, where his dissertation was directed by Gilbert Harman.
He was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2006 until moving to Yale in 2009.
Philosophical work
His work has spanned various topics, including intentionality, free will, the self and dual-character concept.
Knobe effect
Knobe is arguably most widely known for what has come to be called the Knobe effect or the "side-effect effect". According to Jones (2009):
Rather than consulting his own philosophical intuitions, Knobe set out to find out how ordinary people think about intentional action. In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joshua Knobe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.