Education
Knobe received his Bachelor of Arts at Stanford University in 1996 and his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton in 2006, where he studied under Gilbert Harman, among others
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Joshua Knobe
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Career
He is an associate professor in the Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has been discussed in various media, including The New York Times and Slate, and he is a fairly frequent guest on the online news, science, and current events channel bloggingheads.tv.
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 Chief Executive Officer of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&Doctorate comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. lieutenant will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The Chief Executive Officer responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible.
The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.
Did the Chief Executive Officer intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the Chief Executive Officer doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the Chief Executive Officer intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).
This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere.
‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe. Instead, the moral character of an action’s consequences also seems to influence how non-moral aspects of the action – in this case, whether someone did something intentionally or not – are judged.
, & Kelly, South. Doctorate. (2003a).
