What is a colleague? The descriptive and normative dimension of a dual character concept

Reuter, Kevin; Löschke, Jörg; Betzler, Monika

doi:10.1080/09515089.2020.1817885

Cited by 13 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Empirical work on thick concepts is in its infancy. Research on thick concepts has been mostly theoretical (but see Reuter et al, 2020; Willemsen & Reuter, 2021) for some very recent experimental studies). Consequently, many claims that have been made with regard to the nature and structure of thick concepts are based on the linguistic intuitions of a small group of individuals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

Reuter,

Baumgartner,

Willemsen

2023

Lang. cogn.

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Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

Reuter,

Baumgartner,

Willemsen

2023

Lang. cogn.

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“…The present findings suggest that moral traits—in particular, those centered on having a deep‐seated commitment to do the morally right thing—will be seen as highly typical of true humans. This means that perception of moral character may have a larger role to play in determining how (truly) human‐like someone seems than the perception of those non‐moral traits that people regard as uniquely human, such as rationality and culturedness (for a relevant discussion, see Schwartz & Struch, 1989).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, Del Pinal and Reuter (2017) have provided compelling evidence that the normative dimension of a dual character concept represents the commitment to some idealized function (see also Reuter et al, 2020). For example, on this view, people will regard S as a "true artist" only if they believe that S is committed to producing deep works of art.…”

Section: The Role Of Beliefs About Evil and The True Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

“They're Not True Humans:” Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity

Phillips

2022

Cognitive Science

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A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the "paradox of dehumanization." We address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think of their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. We do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent sets of criteria for their application, one of which is descriptive and one of which is normative. Across four experiments, we found evidence that people deploy a descriptive criterion according to which being human is a matter of being a Homo sapiens; as well as a normative criterion according to which being human is a matter of possessing a deep-seated commitment to do the morally right thing. Importantly, we found that people are willing to affirm that someone is human in the descriptive sense, while denying that they are human in the normative sense, and vice versa. In addition to providing a solution to the paradox of dehumanization, these findings suggest that perceptions of moral character have a central role to play in driving dehumanization.

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“…Instead, some features might be merely salient (but not necessary) features of the concept at stake. To overcome this limitation, we decided to use a slight variation of the semantic feature production task (see e.g., Reuter et al 2020), in which participants are asked to produce necessary features, and not just any features that come to mind. 50 participants ( M age = 33.94 ; 20 females, none indicating non-binary gender, all English native speakers) were recruited on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were paid a small fee for taking part in the study.…”

Section: Study 1a: Semantic Features Of Conspiracy Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

What is a Conspiracy Theory?

Napolitano

Reuter

2021

Erkenn

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In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.

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What is a colleague? The descriptive and normative dimension of a dual character concept

Cited by 13 publications

References 19 publications

Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

Tracing thick and thin concepts through corpora

“They're Not True Humans:” Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity

What is a Conspiracy Theory?

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