The Knobe Effect 1 RUNNING HEAD: The Knobe Effect The Knobe Effect: A Brief Overview

Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research. The Knobe Effect 3 Experimental philosophy is the field of philosophy that is defined by the “use of the methods of experimental psychology to probe the way people think about philosophical issues and then examine how the results of such studies bear on traditional philosophical debates” (Nadelhoffer and Nahmias, 2007, p. 123). One area where experimental philosophy has had an impact is action theory. According to Alfred Mele, “Central to the philosophy of action is a concern to understand intentional action ” (1992, p. 199). The contribution of experimenta