EERG
The Experimental Epistemology Research Group at the University at Buffalo consists of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates who seek to illuminate traditional and contemporary debates within epistemology (i.e., the philosophical study of knowledge and justified belief) by using the experimental methods of the cognitive and social sciences.
Latest news (May, 2020): EERG has recently been awarded a $234,000 research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study the philosophy and psychology of epistemic autonomy and its relation to intellectual humility. The three year project (which will run from July, 2020, to June, 2023) will be carried out in collaboration with philosopher Jonathan Matheson (University of North Florida) and psychologist Joshua Wilt (Case Western Reserve University). More details can be found in this press release.
Topics EERG has investigated in the past include:
Latest news (May, 2020): EERG has recently been awarded a $234,000 research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study the philosophy and psychology of epistemic autonomy and its relation to intellectual humility. The three year project (which will run from July, 2020, to June, 2023) will be carried out in collaboration with philosopher Jonathan Matheson (University of North Florida) and psychologist Joshua Wilt (Case Western Reserve University). More details can be found in this press release.
Topics EERG has investigated in the past include:
- The ways in which moral judgments about people's actions affect observers' judgments about how much knowledge those people have (Beebe, 2012, 2013, 2016a, 2016b ; Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010; Beebe & Jensen, 2012; Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson, 2012; Beebe & Shea, 2013)
- Whether people think morality is universal and objective or culturally variable and subjective (Beebe, 2010, 2014, 2015, forthcoming; Beebe, et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016)
- How scientists from different disciplines and historians and philosophers of science think about the objectivity of science (Beebe & Dellsén, 2020)
- Other aspects of folk epistemological thinking (Beebe & Gerken, 2016; Beebe & Monaghan, 2018; Sackris & Beebe, 2014)
- Crosscultural similarities and differences in people's intuitions about the meaning and reference of proper names (Beebe & Undercoffer, 2015, 2016)
- Topics in experimental logic (Shaffer & Beebe, 2019; Frost-Arnold & Beebe, forthcoming)
- How experts and lay people think about and respond differently to disagreements among experts (Beebe et al., 2019)
- Whether the minimal counterintuitiveness of supernatural ideas contributes to their memorability in ways hypothesized by other researchers within the cognitive science of religion (Beebe & Duffy, forthcoming)
- Reproducibility in experimental philosophy (Cova, et al., forthcoming)
- Topics in bioethics (Beverley & Beebe, 2018)