Joshua Knobe

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Joshua Knobe

Residence	Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Nationality	United States
Occupation	experimental philosopher, professor
Employers	the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina
Known for	experimental philosophy
Website http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/

Joshua Knobe is a well known experimental philosopher currently employed as a 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. Before coming to UNC, he was a graduate student at Princeton.

[edit] The Knobe Effect

Knobe's best known 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.^[1] 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.