Milestones

Start of the project

The project started with the following team: Bartosz Maćkiewicz, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator), Katarzyna Kuś, and Joanna Gęgotek (Co-Investigators).

Research article on benefits of meta-analysis in experimental philosophy

Meta-analysis has widely accepted benefits for empirical research: it can establish whether an effect is present more reliably than vote-counting reviews, detect publication bias and p-hacking, estimate effect sizes across studies, and identify important study-level covariates through meta-regression.

The philosophical question is what those benefits mean for experimental philosophy. The project treats meta-analysis not only as a tool for settling empirical controversies, but as a way of studying the stability and universality of intuitions, both of which matter for assessing the evidential role of intuitions in analytic philosophy.

Research article reporting the first meta-analysis: contextualism vs. relativism

Several experimental studies investigate whether context affects the content of natural-language expressions and whether contextualism or relativism gives the better account of that sensitivity. The debate covers epistemic terms, predicates of personal taste, epistemic modality, and aesthetic or moral evaluation.

Existing studies vary across languages, response scales, stimuli, and task formats. Those are exactly the kinds of study-level covariates that can be modeled through meta-analysis to clarify where the apparent disagreement comes from.

Research article on compliance with reporting standards

One of the most common reasons meta-analysis becomes impossible is that published papers do not report the effect-size information, raw data, or descriptive statistics needed for secondary analysis. Missing methodological detail can also make critical study-level covariates impossible to model.

The project therefore includes a dedicated meta-research study on statistical and methodological reporting in experimental philosophy, tailored to the characteristic designs and practices of the field.

• To what extent do papers consistently report statistics about effect sizes?
• To what extent do papers include the descriptive statistics needed to compute effect sizes and their variance?
• To what extent do papers report sample structure, recruitment, timing, and study language?
• To what extent do papers report enough procedural detail about prompts, scales, and design choices?
• How prevalent is public sharing of raw data?
• Does reporting quality improve over time?
• Do journals differ systematically in reporting quality?

Second meta-analysis: moral considerations, typicality, and causation judgments

This line of work begins with studies on how moral judgment affects the application of concepts such as intentional action, knowledge, or cause. The research tradition includes the original Knobe and Fraser findings, follow-up work on atypicality, and later studies manipulating norms, design, prompts, and different kinds of causal structures.

Because the literature is broad and methodologically heterogeneous, a meta-analytic model can estimate which features of the experimental setup actually drive the observed effect sizes.

Third meta-analysis: folk concept of pain

The twentieth-century philosophical theory of pain is strongly tied to the mental or introspective view, which treats pain as a paradigmatic private mental state. Competing work argues for a bodily or perceptual view, according to which people treat pains as properties of bodily states and bodily locations.

Recent empirical studies have challenged both sides, but many of them rely on small or demographically narrow samples, often restricted to English speakers. Meta-analysis creates a way to test whether those sampling and language factors matter for the apparent pattern of results.

Guidelines for meta-analysis and reporting in experimental philosophy

The final deliverable is a pair of methodological guideline sets aimed at improving transparency and making future secondary research easier.

The first set focuses on best practices for reporting empirical studies in experimental philosophy. The second set focuses on how to conduct and interpret meta-analyses for the kinds of questions that matter most in the field.

• Which questions in experimental philosophy are especially suitable for a meta-analytical approach.
• Which recurring forms of experimental variation should be treated as moderators in meta-analytic models.
• Which statistical techniques are most useful for experimental philosophers and how their results should be interpreted.