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Cause and Context: An Experimental Methods Approach to Casual Discourse
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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SSHRC IDG awarded 2020: What we call a cause can vary from one context to another. Causal statements, where one identifies the cause of an event, are sensitive to contextually variant factors such as the circumstances of the statement, and the interests of the interlocutors participating in the discourse. The linguistic mechanism encoding this context sensitivity is not well understood, and there is no consensus even as to whether this mechanism is pragmatic (concerned with language usage) or semantic (concerned with linguistic meaning). The aim of the proposed project is to identify the extent and nature of the context sensitivity exhibited by causal statements. The methodology of the project is to study the linguistic behaviour of English users for causal statements through experimental philosophy, using techniques traditionally associated with cognitive science. As this is an emergent and controversial methodology in philosophy, the primary researcher and graduate research assistants will critically assess this methodology through a review of the experimental philosophy literature. Using this literature review as a guideline, we will design and conduct online surveys for causal statements; and then compile, and run statistical analyses on, the resulting data. The surveys will consist of diagnostic tests for various candidate pragmatic and semantic mechanisms. After running surveys for basic causal statements, we will run surveys for a range of more complex causal statements, including omissions, overdetermination, and preemption. Taken together, these cases will contribute to a general account of the context sensitivity of causal statements.
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- Date created
- 2020-02-01
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- Type of Item
- Research Material
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- License
- ©️Corkum, Philip. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2024.