Posts by Collection

Blog:

The Jargon Blog

An occassional blog discussing the philosophy of technical language, written for a general-ish audience.

Blog:

Simpsons Literalism

A dumb passion project where I use the exegetical methods of young earth creationism to ask ‘What would we conclude about the Simpsons universe if we treated every joke, every aside, every absurd plot point as something that actually, literally happened?’ The answer: Itchy is a transdimensional being of terrifying power, Maggie is her age essentially, and it’s unclear if the characters on the show are actually human.

Blog Post:

Learning from AI’s Bullshit

An exploration of how we can responsibly learn from AI, even if it cannot know anything. A public-facing version of arguments made in my papers in AI & Society and Cognition at the Blog of the APA.

Podcast Appearance:

Mind Games Podcast

In an interview by psychologist Rohan Kapitany, I discuss the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy as it relates to role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons with psychologist and collaborator Kathryn Francis.

Blog Post:

Social Distancing Is Not Social Distancing: Why Specialists Ought to Choose Jargon Responsibly

A public-facing discussion at the Public Ethics Blog on the importance of language choice in times of crisis and how experts dropped the ball in March 2020.

Blog Post:

Why do philosophers love thought experiments so much?

Philosophers love thought experiments (including myself). We tell ourselves it is because thought experiments are ‘clean’ and ‘precise’, but in this post for the Junkyard Blog, I ask if philosophers actually use them because thought experiments are useful. Specifically, they are easy to deploy and difficult to argue against.

Innovating Methods for the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies

Does new technology require new approaches to philosophy? Yes, and not least because philosophy itself could use a few methodological innovations. New technologies can strain our existing conceptual repertoir creating, for example, metaphilosophical questions around who, if anyone, has genuine conceptual expertise. The first paper of this project accordingly evaluates the approaches philosophers (and interested psychologists) have used to understand whether trusting AI is conceptually coherent. Not only are these methods lacking, more appropriate methods that we adapted from experimental philosophy of language suggest that philosophers have lost the thread on what trust is to everyone else.

Another project, currently in the late stages of preparation, argues that VR versions of moral dilemmas should be adopted as a method in philosophy due to its ability to help users to reevaluate features of the dilemma.

The Ethics and Efficacy of Label Design

Every idea needs a linguistic vehicle – a serious of sounds and letters that we use to discuss it. What effect do such labels have on our perception of the world and how can we responsibly harness this power when designing language? My experimental work has found that label choice has a subtle but very real effect on perceptions of novel concepts. In other words, what we call something affects how we see something. This put weight to the criticism labels sometimes get for being misleading or harmful. I have argued that this criticism is best understood as a mismatch between what non-linguistic information people are apt to infer from a label and what beliefs would be true, helpful, or otherwise desirable.

These findings have consequences for projects of language activism, especially conceptual engineering. If conceptual engineering aims to improve concepts and language to some political, ethical, or epistemic end, then any intended change can be helped or hindered by the effect of labels. Because labels effects are ultimately individual-specific, conceptual engineering should therefore engage in market research when deciding what label to use.

The Learning from Bullshit Trilogy

Across three papers I explored how we can learn from people or things that bullshit us – that don’t care if what they are telling us is true. The core observation in these works is that even when someone cannot, does not want to, or does not intent to tell us the truth, they can nonetheless show us something is true. The first paper looks at insincerely written works of philosophy, such as philosophical hoaxes, arguing such works are perfectly capable of producing knowledge in readers. This, I argued, has metaphilosophical consequences for what inferences we can draw about the methods of philosophy from works of philosophy (a theme I later returned to in the context of conceptual engineering.)

Then ChatGPT happened. Turning to AI, the next paper turned to the question of artificial moral advisors – AI designed to help people make moral decisions. With collaborators, we argued that even if AI does not in any sense know what it is ‘saying’, AI can be used responsibly for moral growth. However, it is only responsible if users use the AI as inspiration for their own thinking and moral growth rather than simply deferring to its advice (see also this post at the APA blog an account generalized beyond ethics). The final paper in the trilogy experimentally tested this distinction in epistemic stances taken towards artificial moral advice. By manipulating the justification for moral advice and participants’ evidence of the moral advisor’s reliability, we found that people who are persuaded by AI moral advice do so because they do in fact defer to the advice. Therefore, intervention should be taken to help develop norms around epistemically responsible AI use.

The Methodology of Conceptual Engineering

At rock bottom, conceptual engineering is about improving how people talk or think. This project explores how conceptual engineering needs to be an empirical process in order to succeed. One strand argues from the armchair that conceptual engineering requires novel methodology approaches. As a practice, conceptual engineers should adopt entirely new methods than they currently use if they are serious about creating real-world impact. At the same time, if we are to understand conceptual engineering as a historical tradition in philosophy, there is no one method by which we should study it. Another strand of the project develops exactly the sort of empirical frameworks the first strand argues conceptual engineers need. Perhaps the most pressing need is a way to test whether conceptual revision occurs. Otherwise conceptual engineers are left guessing whether their intended changes are successful. The uptake of new concepts is easier to spot, but how do conceptual engineers stack the odds in their favor? As I both argue and experimentally demonstrate, one way is by careful choice of what the concept is called.

Experimental Epistemology of Philosophy

Experimental philosophy has been, at risk of understating things, quite controversial among analytic philosophers. Among its most controversial projects aims to evaluate the epistemology of thought experiments (and other methods of philosophy) using experimental data.

Philosophy and philosophy: the subject matter and the discipline

The University of St Andrews, 2021

My dissertation argues that yes, experimental philosophy can reveal facts about philosophers' epistemic standing. But to tell a full picture of the epistemology of philosophy, I argue we need to also draw insights from anthropology, sociology, and lexicography.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Philosophy and philosophy: the subject matter and the discipline. PhD thesis, The University of St Andrews, June 2021.

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

A paper exploring how philosophers learn from one another.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts. Philosophical Studies, 180(1):207–225, January 2023.

The threat of the intuition-shaped hole

Some authors have tried to defend thought experiments from empirical critique by arguing said passages argue by argument, not intuition. This paper argues that because thought experiments have changed many people's minds and the purported arguments aren't very good, intuition denial makes the problem it tries to solve worse.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes. The threat of the intuition-shaped hole. Inquiry, 66(4):539–564, April 2023.

Conceptual engineering is old news

There are different ways of understanding the claim that conceptual engineering is or is not a new method of philosophy. We distinguish three, mapping out how they differ, how plausible they are, and how to go about more definitely establishing each.

Full Citation: Krzysztof Sękowski and Ethan Landes. Conceptual engineering is old news. The Philosophical Quarterly, pages pqae087, July 2024.

How Language Teaches and Misleads: "Coronavirus" and "Social Distancing" as Case Studies

This paper uses public health messaging at the start of COVID to draw broader lessons about the ethics and efficacy of language choice.

Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design

An experimental paper examining how people's interpretations of novel concepts are affected by what those novel concepts are called. ​

Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Is it a tastytaste or a greedgrab? The importance of label choice in language design. Philosophical Psychology, 0(0):1–28, 2025.

Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical

A paper in which I argue that if conceptual engineers are serious about improving the concepts people use, the methods of conceptual engineering should look nothing like the methods of armchair philosophy.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes. Conceptual Engineering Should be Empirical. Erkenntnis, February 2025.

Conceptual Revision in Action

This project developed a way to measure and test whether interventions changed a person's conceptual content, focusing on the concepts DINOSAUR and PLANET. Easily my favorite of my own experimental papers.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes and Kevin Reuter. Conceptual Revision in Action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, April 2025.

Rage against the authority machines: how to design artificial moral advisors for moral enhancement

We argue that AI moral advice can be used responsibly to help develop one's own morality, but only if we take the right epistemic stance towards it.

Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Cristina Voinea, and Radu Uszkai. Rage against the authority machines: how to design artificial moral advisors for moral enhancement. AI & Society, 40(4):2237–2248, April 2025.

Trust in artificial moral advisors across cultures

In a study across 12 countries we find that even though people distrust moral advice from AI more than moral advice from humans, AI moral advice is still persusasive.

Full Citation: Scott Claessens, Konrad Bocian, Paulo Boggio, Grégory Fiorio, Léo Fitouchi, Zeynep Genc, Ivar R Hannikainen, Lea C Kamitz, Tamino Konur, Ethan Landes, Peng Liu, Katarzyna Miazek, Waldir M Sampaio, Jorge Suárez, Pierce Veitch, Onurcan Yilmaz, Hongbo Yu, and Jim A C Everett. Trust in artificial moral advisors across cultures. March 2026.

People defer to AI moral advice, but not blindly

Why do people find LLM-generated moral advice convincing? Worryingly, it is because it strikes them as "good enough".

Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Kathryn B. Francis, and Jim A. C. Everett. People defer to AI moral advice, but not blindly. Cognition, 272:106504, July 2026.

AI Should Develop Human Empathy, Not Replace It

A short discussion of the way much scholarship on AI "empathy" inappropriately commodifies empathy and should instead emphasize improving our own human capacities for caring about others.

Trust in AI is Not a Conceptual Confusion

Philosophers have stood nearly alone in claiming that "trust in AI" and "trustworthy AI" is conceptual nonsense. In this empirical paper we find instead that it is perfectly coherent and that philosophers may have lost the plot on "trust".

Full Citation: Ethan Landes, Scott Claessens, and Jim A. C. Everett. Trust in AI is Not a Conceptual Confusion. Ergo, 2027.

Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field

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Tutorial 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field

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Talk 2 on Relevant Topic in Your Field

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Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field

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Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

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Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

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