var xpapers_embed_buffer = ''; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  1. (1 other version)New Issues for New Methods: Ethical and Editorial Challenges for an Experimental Philosophy.Andrea Polonioli - forthcoming - Science and Engineering Ethics.
    This paper examines a constellation of ethical and editorial issues that have arisen since philosophers started to conduct, submit and publish empirical research. These issues encompass concerns over responsible authorship, fair treatment of human subjects, ethicality of experimental procedures, availability of data, unselective reporting and publishability of research findings. This study aims to assess whether the philosophical community has as yet successfully addressed such issues. To do so, the instructions for authors, submission process and published research papers of 29 main journals in philosophy have been considered and analyzed. In light of the evidence reported here, it is argued that the philosophical community has as yet failed to properly tackle such issues. The paper also delivers some recommendations for authors, reviewers and editors in the field.
  2. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  3. Review of Joshua Alexander, Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction.Timothy Williamson - forthcoming - Philosophy.
  4. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  5. X-Phi within its Proper Bounds.Jonathan Dixon - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 1:1-26.
    Using two decades worth of experimental philosophy (aka x-phi), Edouard Machery argues in Philosophy within its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017) that philosophers’ use of the “method of cases” is unreliable because it has a strong tendency to elicit different intuitive responses from non-philosophers. And because, as Machery argues, appealing to such cases is usually the only way for philosophers to acquire the kind of knowledge they seek, an extensive philosophical skepticism follows. I argue that Machery’s “Unreliability” argument fails because, once its premises are percisified, they are either self-defeating or without justification. This is a significant result because Machery’s arguments are the most widely cited and discussed x-phi arguments for philosophical skepticism and many hold that Machery provides the most empirically informed, convincing, and thus best case for this kind of skepticism. So, if my arguments are sound, then the best x-phi argument for philosophical skepticism fails. I further argue that this result provides strong reason to believe the more general conclusion that “negative” x-phi is likely doomed: x-phi likely can never support a substantive philosophical skepticism. Ultimately, I argue for the broad conclusion that all empirically minded arguments for philosophical skepticism are likely to fail for the same reasons that Machery’s does, i.e. they are (likely) self-defeating.
  6. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  7. Expressive Responding, Experimental Philosophy, and Philosophical Expertise.Shane Nicholas Glackin - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (3):909-931.
    The Experimental Philosophy (“X-Phi”) movement applies the methodology of empirical sciences – most commonly empirical psychology – to traditional philosophical questions. In its radical, “negative” form, X-Phi uses the resulting empirical data to cast doubt on the reliability of common philosophical methods, arguing for radical reform of philosophical methodology.In this paper I develop two connected methodological worries about this second enterprise. The first concerns the data elicited by questionnaires and other empirical survey methods; recent work in political science suggests that such surveys frequently do not elicit the participants’ candid judgements, but rather their expressions of certain attitudes and identifications. This possibility stymies the arguments from experimental data to a radical overhaul of philosophical methodology. The second builds on recent work by L.A. Paul and Kieran Healy concerning social science methodology, applying it to the use of those methods in X-Phi. It concerns experimental design where the treatment investigated is a “transformative” one; since a philosophical education is plausibly one such treatment, doubt is cast on any claim that apparent differences between the judgements of philosophers and ordinary folk has implications for philosophical methodology.
  8. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  9. The Expertise Defense and Experimental Philosophy of Free Will.Kiichi Inarimori - 2024 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 24:125-143.
    This paper aims to vindicate the expertise defense in light of the experimental philosophy of free will. My central argument is that the analogy strategy between philosophy and other domains is defensible, at least in the free will debate, because philosophical training contributes to the formation of philosophical intuition by enabling expert philosophers to understand philosophical issues correctly and to have philosophical intuitions about them. This paper will begin by deriving two requirements on the expertise defense from major criticisms of it. First, precisely how philosophical training contributes to the formation of philosophical intuitions requires explanation (Contribution); second, it must be explained how philosophical training immunizes philosophical intuitions from distorting factors (Immunity). I shall argue that the Contribution requirement is crucial for the expertise defense and that this requirement can be satisfied at least in the domain of free will: recent research shows that most novices are unable to understand determinism correctly, suggesting that having intuitions about determinism requires philosophical expertise. I then discuss how this proposal can be applied to other philosophical disciplines.
  10. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  11. La defensa de la pericia y la filosofía experimental del libre albedrío.Kiichi Inarimori - 2024 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 24:125-143.
    Este artículo pretende reivindicar la defensa de la pericia a la luz de la filosofía experimental del libre albedrío. Mi argumento central es que la estrategia de analogía entre la filosofía y otros dominios es defendible, al menos en el debate sobre el libre albedrío, porque la formación filosófica contribuye a la formación de la intuición filosófica al permitir a los filósofos expertos comprender correctamente las cuestiones filosóficas y tener intuiciones filosóficas sobre ellas. Este artículo comenzará derivando dos requisitos para la defensa de la pericia a partir de las principales críticas a la misma. En primer lugar, es preciso explicar con precisión cómo contribuye la formación filosófica a la creación de intuiciones filosóficas (Contribución); en segundo lugar, debe explicarse cómo la formación filosófica inmuniza a las intuiciones filosóficas frente a factores distorsionadores (Inmunidad). Argumentaré que el requisito de Contribución es crucial para la defensa de la pericia y que este requisito puede satisfacerse al menos en el dominio del libre albedrío: investigaciones recientes muestran que la mayoría de las personas inexpertas son incapaces de entender correctamente el determinismo, lo que sugiere que tener intuiciones sobre el determinismo requiere pericia filosófica. A continuación, discuto cómo esta propuesta puede aplicarse a otras disciplinas filosóficas.
  12. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  13. Limitations and Criticism of Experimental Philosophy.Theodore Bach - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser, The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 101-130.
    Experimental philosophy involves subjecting philosophical methods and judgments to empirical scrutiny. I begin by exploring conceptual, confirmational, and empirical factors that limit the significance of experiment-based and survey-based approaches to the evaluation of philosophical epistemic activities. I then consider specific criticisms of experimental philosophy: its experimental conditions lack ecological validity; it wrongly assumes that philosophers rely on psychologized data; it overlooks the reflective and social elements of philosophical case analysis; it misconstrues the importance of both procedural and evaluative forms of philosophical expertise; it incorrectly views psychological bias as incompatible with reliability; and it generalizes to a global, self-defeating skepticism about case judgment. I explain why these criticisms should be understood as converging and interdependent. I also set out a three-level model of philosophical case judgment that frames the criticisms.
  14. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  15. Projects and Methods of Experimental Philosophy.Eugen Fischer & Justin Sytsma - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser, The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 39-70.
    How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities.
  16. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  17. Coming full circle: Incentives, reactivity, and the experimental turn.María Jiménez-Buedo - 2023 - In Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán Torres & Fernando Aguiar, Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 144-160.
    For years, the phenomenon of experimental reactivity (defined as the alteration of the subject’s behaviour as a result of their awareness of being studied) seemed to be of little or no concern to experimental economists. With their clear-cut methodological stance shaped by Vernon Smith’s list of precepts, economists could avoid the worries associated with subjects’ reactivity through a rigorous control over the incentives proposed by the experimental setting as designed in the game. More recently, as experimental economists gradually moved in their study towards topics in which economic incentives intermingled with normative considerations (such as in the study of altruism, punishment, or social norms), a corresponding interest in the problem of reactivity has ensued. This chapter offers an interpretation of this transit: it argues that the success of experimental economics and the unforeseen expansion of their object of enquiry into the realm of ethics and norm-related behaviour forces experimental economists to adopt some of the conceptual tools of psychologists. This ultimately undermined the economists’ initial methodological project, but this is the price to be paid to study the mechanisms of prosociality. This way, and regarding the pitfalls of reactivity, experimental economists are in the same predicament as fellow psychologists, philosophers, and other social scientists.
  18. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  19. Experimental Philosophy and Ordinary Language Philosophy.Masaharu Mizumoto - 2023 - In David Bordonaba-Plou, Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 31-56.
    This chapter tries to elucidate the complex relationship between ordinary language philosophyordinary language philosophy (OLP) and experimental philosophy (X-Phi) from the perspective of the contrast between the positive and the negative programs of X-Phi. I will first show the relevance of language to the various fields of contemporary philosophy, through what I call the Argument from Cross-Linguistic Diversity and the Argument from Intra-Linguistic Variance, together with empirical data. This will partly vindicate OLP, which is generally thought to be obsolete today. I will then examine the reasons for the demise of OLP, and show that the contemporary meta-philosophical debates over X-Phi are in fact a revival of the debates in the heyday of OLP. This will then also indicate a parallel between Wittgenstein’s negative programnegative program, called quietism, and the negative program of X-Phi, especially Stich’s. The positive program of X-Phi can no doubt contribute to science, but the question of whether it is philosophy may depend on our conception of philosophy. The negative program of X-Phi is no doubt philosophy, but the question is whether it can make any positive contribution to philosophy, let alone science. I will answer “yes” to it, by sketching a radical negative picture of philosophy in general.
  20. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  21. The Challenges to the Study of Cultural Variation in Cognition.Martin J. Packer & Michael Cole - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):515-537.
    We describe seven challenges that confront the kind of cross-cultural research currently practiced in experimental philosophy, illustrating them in an example in which intuitions about moral responsibility were studied in participants in four different countries. The seven challenge are (1) defining culture, (2) finding representative samples, (3) defining cognition, (4) task variation, (5) ecological validity, (6) interpreting the results, and (7) conducting ethical research. We suggest that these challenges can be overcome or avoided by attending to the ways cognition arises in everyday life, and briefly describe an approach which regards culture not as an independent variable but as the medium of human action and human life, and which regards cognition as situated in time and place.
  22. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  23. Hasty Generalizations Are Pervasive in Experimental Philosophy: A Systematic Analysis.Uwe Peters & Olivier Lemeire - 2023 - Philosophy of Science.
    Scientists may sometimes generalize from their samples to broader populations when they have not yet sufficiently supported this generalization. Do such hasty generalizations also occur in experimental philosophy? To check, we analyzed 171 experimental philosophy studies published between 2017 and 2023. We found that most studies tested only Western populations but generalized beyond them without justification. There was also no evidence that studies with broader conclusions had larger, more diverse samples, but they nonetheless had higher citation impact. Our analyses reveal important methodological limitations of many experimental philosophy studies and suggest that philosophical training may not protect against hasty generalizations.
  24. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  25. Philosophers' linguistic expertise: A psycholinguistic approach to the expertise objection against experimental philosophy.Eugen Fischer, Paul E. Engelhardt & Aurélie Herbelot - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-33.
    Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the cases described. We examine two possible sources of difference: Philosophers could be better at deploying concepts, and this could make them less susceptible to comprehension biases (‘linguistic expertise objection’). Alternatively, exposure to different patterns of linguistic usage could render philosophers vulnerable to a fundamental comprehension bias, the linguistic salience bias, at different points (‘linguistic usage objection’). Together, these objections mount a novel ‘master argument’ against experimental philosophy. To develop and empirically assess this argument, we employ corpus analysis and distributional semantic analysis and elicit plausibility ratings from academic philosophers and psychology undergraduates. Our findings suggest philosophers are better at deploying concepts than laypeople but are susceptible to the linguistic salience bias to a similar extent and at similar points. We identify methodological consequences for experimental philosophy and for philosophical thought experiments.
  26. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  27. Uloga intuicija u epistemologiji.Jelena Mijić - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Belgrade
    Predmet ove disertacije se u najširem smislu može posmatrati kao odgovor na meta-epistemološko pitanje o zadatku epistemologije i načinu na koji bi epistemološki projekat trebalo voditi. U radu prikazujemo i kritički analiziramo debatu savremenih metafilozofa o ulozi, a posledično i prirodi intuicija u savremenoj analitičkoj filozofiji. Osnovni cilj našeg rada je da odbranimo stav da epistemičke intuicije igraju ulogu evidencije u okviru metoda analize pojma znanja. Ovaj stav deo je standardne slike o epistemološkoj metodologiji koja se poslednjih godina dovodi u pitanje, kako od strane naučno orijentisanih filozofskih naturalista, tako i filozofskih tradicionalista. Kao ključni problem izdvajamo neuspeh zastupnika standardne slike o filozofskoj metodologiji da ponude odgovor na pitanje prirode intuicija. Prema našem mišljenju ovaj neuspeh posledica je propusta koji prave kako zastupnici, tako i kritičari pozivanja na intuicije u filozofiji kada pristupaju ovoj metafilozofskoj debati. Jednom kada uvidimo da moramo podrobnije razumeti metode u okviru kojih se pozivamo na intuicije, uočićemo da filozofske intuicije ne smemo posmatrati kao homogenu klasu, već da ispitivanju njihove prirode moramo pristupiti u okviru pojedinačnih filozofskih disciplina. Kada smo ovu strategiju primenili u našem istraživanju došli smo do zaključka da intuicije kao izraz pojmovne kompetencije igraju ulogu evidencije u metodima pojmovne analize i misaonog eksperimenta koji su karakteristični za savremenu analitičku epistemologiju.
  28. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  29. The Challenge of Experimental Philosophy.Nenad Miscevic - 2022 - In Thought Experiments. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 91-121.
    We have briefly mentioned some criticisms of TEs, and tried to defend TEs from them. In this chapter we focus on a recent critical movement, the so called “experimental philosophy”, X-phi for short that has been in the center of discussion of TEs in the last two decades.
  30. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  31. Insufficient Effort Responding in Experimental Philosophy.Thomas Pölzler - 2022 - In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Providing valid responses to a self-report survey requires cognitive effort. Subjects engaging in insufficient effort responding (IER) are unwilling to take this effort. Compared to psychologists, experimental philosophers so far seem to have paid less attention to IER. This paper is an attempt to begin to alleviate this shortcoming. First, I explain IER’s nature, prevalence and negative effects in self-report surveys in general. Second, I argue that IER might also affect experimental philosophy studies. Third, I develop recommendations as to how experimental philosophers should (and should not) try to prevent IER. Fourth, I develop recommendations as to how experimental philosophers should (and should not) try to detect IER. Fifth, I sketch how experimental philosophers ought to proceed once a subject has been identified as an insufficient effort responder. And finally, I report the results of an online survey that addresses experimental philosophers’ current knowledge, consideration and assessment of IER.
  32. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  33. The Concept of Intuition in Experimental Philosophy.Krzysztof Sękowski - 2022 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 12 (1):111-128.
    Although the concept of intuition has a central place in experimental philosophy, it is still far from being clear. Moreover, critics of that movement often argue that the concept of intuition in experimental philosophy does not correspond to the concept of intuition used in traditional, armchair philosophy. However, such a claim is problematic, because most attempts to define this concept are made with regard to the armchair philosophy’s point of view and not that of experimental philosophy. In the article I analyse the concept of intuition in experimental philosophy by taking into account its theoretical assumptions, and the research practice of its representatives. By analysing the most influential experimental philosophers’ views, I formulate its core characteristics. According to them, intuition is a mental state that is a reaction to the described case, which is revealed in the readiness to express a judgment about this case. Then, I investigate step by step the frequently postulated methodological, phenomenological, and etiological conditions that could narrow down the initial definition. I show that the only condition coherent with experimental philosophy’s assumptions and its practice is an etiological one, as the mental state that could be classified as intuition has to be shaped by pragmatic, and not only semantic factors. In the last parts of the text, I draw out some of the consequences of the position that I have presented, regarding the methodology of experimental philosophy and philosophy in general.
  34. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  35. Thinking Off Your Feet: Reply to My Critics.Michael Strevens - 2022 - Analysis 82 (2):343-353.
  36. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  37. Experimental philosophy within its proper bounds.John Symons - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (5):586-606.
    ABSTRACT In Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds, Édouard Machery argues that the results of experimental philosophy (‘x-phi’) should lead us to abandon much of traditional philosophical practice. In its place Machery defends naturalized conceptual analysis as a more modest and pragmatic alternative to standard analytic philosophy. This paper argues that Machery overstates the metaphilosophical significance of x-phi’s results. We can and should keep many of the insights and good methodological habits that come with x-phi. However, if one is not already convinced of pragmatism or naturalism, the discoveries of x-phi are unlikely to make too much difference to one’s metaphilosophical position.
  38. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  39. Making Sense of the Knobe-effect : Praise demands both Intention and Voluntariness.Istvan Zoltan Zardai - 2022 - Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy 13:11-20.
    The paper defends the idea that when we evaluate whether agents deserve praise or blame for their actions, we evaluate both whether their action was intentional, and whether it was voluntary. This idea can explain an asymmetry in blameworthiness and praiseworthiness: Agents can be blamed if they have acted either intentionally or voluntarily. However, to merit praise we expect agents to have acted both intentionally and voluntarily. This asymmetry between demands of praise and blame offers an interpretation of the Knobeeffect: in the well-known experiment people blame a company chairman because, although he harmed the environment unintentionally, he did so voluntarily. In turn, praise is withheld, because the chairman did not benefit the environment intentionally. This is a way of rendering the Knobe-effect a rational outcome. It is an advantage of this position, that the distinction between the intentionality and voluntariness of actions can be upheld, whether or not it is the best explanation of the Knobe-effect.
  40. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  41. Why the Empirical Study of Non-philosophical Expertise Does not Undermine the Status of Philosophical Expertise.Theodore Bach - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (4):999-1023.
    In some domains experts perform better than novices, and in other domains experts do not generally perform better than novices. According to empirical studies of expert performance, this is because the former but not the latter domains make available to training practitioners a direct form of learning feedback. Several philosophers resource this empirical literature to cast doubt on the quality of philosophical expertise. They claim that philosophy is like the dubious domains in that it does not make available the good, direct kind of learning feedback, and thus there are empirical grounds for doubting the epistemic quality of philosophical expertise. I examine the empirical studies that are purportedly bad news for professional philosophers. On the basis of that examination, I provide three reasons why the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise does not undermine the status of philosophical expertise. First, the non-philosophical task-types from which the critics generalize are unrepresentative of relevant philosophical task-types. Second, empirical critiques of non-philosophical experts are often made relative to the performance of linear models—a comparison that is inapt in a philosophical context. Third, the critics fail to discuss findings from the empirical study of non-philosophical expertise that have more favorable implications for the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. In addition to discussing implications for philosophical expertise, this article makes progress in the philosophical analysis of the science of expertise and expert development.
  42. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  43. Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition.Michael Bergmann - 2021 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Radical skepticism endorses the extreme claim that large swaths of our ordinary beliefs, such as those produced by perception or memory, are irrational. The best arguments for such skepticism are, in their essentials, as familiar as a popular science fiction movie and yet even seasoned epistemologists continue to find them strangely seductive. Moreover, although most contemporary philosophers dismiss radical skepticism, they cannot agree on how best to respond to the challenge it presents. In the tradition of the 18th century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition joins this discussion by taking up four main tasks. First, it identifies the strongest arguments for radical skepticism, namely, underdetermination arguments, which emphasize the gap between our evidence and our ordinary beliefs based on that evidence. Second, it rejects all inferential or argument-based responses to radical skepticism, which aim to lay out good noncircular reasoning from the evidence on which we base our ordinary beliefs to the conclusion that those beliefs are probably true. Third, it develops a commonsense noninferential response to radical skepticism with two distinctive features: it consciously and extensively relies on epistemic intuitions, which are seemings about epistemic goods, such as knowledge and rationality, and it can be endorsed without difficulty by both internalists and externalists in epistemology. Fourth, and finally, it defends this commonsense epistemic-intuition-based response to radical skepticism against a variety of objections, including those connected with underdetermination worries, epistemic circularity, disagreement problems, experimental philosophy, and concerns about whether it engages skepticism in a sufficiently serious way.
  44. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  45. Measuring metaaesthetics: Challenges and ways forward.David Moss & Lance S. Bush - 2021 - New Ideas in Psychology 62.
    A growing body of psychological research seeks to understand how people's thinking comports with long-standing philosophical theories, such as whether they view ethical or aesthetic truths as subjective or objective. Yet such research can be critically undermined if it fails to accurately characterize the philosophical positions in question and fails to ensure that subjects understand them appropriately. We argue that a recent article by Rabb et al. (2020) fails to meet these demands and propose several constructive solutions for future research.
  46. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  47. One: but not the same.John Schwenkler, Nick Byrd, Enoch Lambert & Matthew Taylor - 2021 - Philosophical Studies (6).
    Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments.
  48. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  49. Does “Ought” Imply “Can”?Peter van Inwagen - 2021 - In Marco Hausmann & Jörg Noller, Free Will: Historical and Analytic Perspectives. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 313-333.
    The principle “Ought implies can” has important connections with the problem of free will. In this chapter, I lay out these connections and proceed to consider a recent exercise in “experimental philosophy” whose results some have regarded as constituting an important challenge to the principle. Although many, perhaps most, philosophers regard the principle as an analytic truth, a survey of non-philosophers conducted in 2016 has led its authors to conclude that non-philosophers do not accept the “Ought implies can” principle. The main topics of this chapter are a critical evaluation of the authors’ interpretation of the results of their survey and an examination of the implications of those results for the question whether the principle is true.
  50. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  51. Thought Experiments and the (Ir-)relevance of intuitions in Philosophy.Daniel Cohnitz - 2020 - In Julia Hermann, Jeroen Hopster, Wouter Kalf & Michael Klenk, Philosophy in the Age of Science? Inquiries into Philosophical Progess, Method, and Societal Relevance. Fordham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 95-110.
  52. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  53. Saving the armchair by experiment: what works in economics doesn’t work in philosophy.Boudewijn de Bruin - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (8):2483-2508.
    Financial incentives, learning, group consultation, and increased experimental control are among the experimental techniques economists have successfully used to deflect the behavioral challenge posed by research conducted by such scholars as Tversky and Kahneman. These techniques save the economic armchair to the extent that they align laypeople judgments with economic theory by increasing cognitive effort and reflection in experimental subjects. It is natural to hypothesize that a similar strategy might work to address the experimental or restrictionist challenge to armchair philosophy. To test this hypothesis, a randomized controlled experiment was carried out, as well as two lab experiments. Three types of knowledge attribution tasks were used. No support for the hypothesis was found. The paper describes the close similarities between the economist’s response to the behavioral challenge, and the expertise defense against the experimental challenge, and presents the experiments, results, and an array of robustness checks. The upshot is that these results make the experimental challenge all the more forceful.
  54. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  55. Haidt et al.’s Case for Moral Pluralism Revisited.Tanya De Villiers-Botha - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (2):244-261.
    Recent work in moral psychology that claims to show that human beings make moral judgements on the basis of multiple, divergent moral foundations has been influential in both moral psychology and moral philosophy. Primarily, such work has been taken to undermine monistic moral theories, especially those pertaining to the prevention of harm. Here, I call one of the most prominent and influential empirical cases for moral pluralism into question, namely that of Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. I argue that Haidt et al.’s argument is not as strong as it is often made out to be, given significant problems with the design of one of the key experiments used to ground the claim that there are divergent moral foundations across cultures. The flaws that I point out pose a significant challenge to Haidt et al.’s findings and have a detrimental impact on subsequent work based on this immensely influential experiment. Accordingly, I argue that both empirical and normative claims made on the basis of Haidt et al.’s findings should be treated with caution. I conclude by making some suggestions as to how some of the problems that I point out might be addressed.
  56. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  57. No hope for the Irrelevance Claim.Miguel Egler - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3351-3371.
    Empirical findings about intuitions putatively cast doubt on the traditional methodology of philosophy. Herman Cappelen and Max Deutsch have argued that these methodological concerns are unmotivated as experimental findings about intuitions are irrelevant for assessments of the methodology of philosophy—I dub this the ‘Irrelevance Claim’. In this paper, I first explain that for Cappelen and Deutsch to vindicate the Irrelevance Claim from a forceful objection, their arguments have to establish that intuitions play no epistemically significant role whatsoever in philosophy—call this the ‘Orthogonality Claim’. I then argue that even under a charitable reading of their views Cappelen and Deutsch fail to establish the Orthogonality Claim. Lastly, I discuss empirical evidence that the Orthogonality Claim is false. The arguments in this paper will demonstrate that Cappelen and Deutsch cannot motivate the Irrelevance Claim and that their replies to recent experimental attacks on traditional methodology of philosophy do not succeed.
  58. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  59. Intuition as Conscious Experience.Ole Koksvik - 2020 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    \"The nature of intuition and its relation to other mental faculties, particularly perception, is one of the most hotly contested debates in philosophy of mind and psychology. Do intuitions justify belief or merely dispositions to believe? Is intuition a mental state with distinctive phenomenal qualities and if so, how do these differ from normal perceptual states? Drawing on the most recent philosophical research on intuition and perception, Ole Koksvik defends the idea that intuition not only justifies belief but can play a much wider role in our everyday epistemic lives than previously thought. Arguing that intuitional experience is similar to perceptual experience he develops a novel view of intuition as conscious experience. His argument involves both a close description of the kind of experience that intuition is and a defence of intuition against criticism from experimental philosophy. The picture that emerges defends intuitions not because they can be found to be true or false but because they permit us to consider the world as it is might otherwise be and are continuous with the rest of general human inquiry\"--.
  60. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  61. In Defence of Armchair Expertise.Theodore Bach - 2019 - Theoria 85 (5):350-382.
    In domains like stock brokerage, clinical psychiatry, and long‐term political forecasting, experts generally fail to outperform novices. Empirical researchers agree on why this is: experts must receive direct or environmental learning feedback during training to develop reliable expertise, and these domains are deficient in this type of feedback. A growing number of philosophers resource this consensus view to argue that, given the absence of direct or environmental philosophical feedback, we should not give the philosophical intuitions or theories of expert philosophers greater credence than those of novice philosophers. This article has three objectives. The first is to explore several overlooked issues concerning the strategy of generalizing from empirical studies of non‐philosophical expertise to the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. The second is to explain why empirical research into a causal relationship between direct learning feedback and enhanced expert performance does not provide good grounds for abandoning a default optimism about the epistemic superiority of expert philosophical theories. The third is to sketch a positive characterization of learning feedback that addresses developmental concerns made salient by the empirical literature on expert performance for specifically theory‐driven or “armchair” domains like philosophy.
  62. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  63. The Conceptual Impossibility of Free Will Error Theory.Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (2):99-120.
    This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free will error theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from the conceptual impossibility thesis that many of our actions are in fact free. Hence it follows that free will error theory - the view that no judgement of the form ‘action A was performed freely’ - is false. I will show taking seriously the conceptual impossibility thesis helps makes good sense of some seemingly inconsistent results in recent experimental philosophy work on determinism and our concept of free will. Further, I will present some reasons why we should expect to find similar results for every other factor we might have thought was important for free will.
  64. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  65. Experimental Philosophy: A Critical Study.Nikil Mukerji - 2019 - London, UK; New York, USA: Rowman & Littlefield International.
    Suitable for student readers and more advanced scholars who would like an introduction to experimental philosophy, this book guides the reader through current debates on the topic, and provides links to current and emerging work in the field.
  66. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  67. Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy.Michael Strevens - 2019 - Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press.
    What is going on under the hood in philosophical analysis, that familiar process that attempts to uncover the nature of such philosophically interesting kinds as knowledge, causation, and justice by the method of posit and counterexample? How, in particular, do intuitions tell us about philosophical reality? The standard, if unappealing, answer is that philosophical analysis is conceptual analysis—that what we learn about when we do philosophy is in the first instance facts about our own minds. Drawing on recent work on the psychology of concepts, this book proposes a new understanding of philosophical analysis, which I call inductive analysis. The thesis that philosophical analysis is inductive analysis explains how novel, substantive philosophical knowledge can be generated in the armchair. It also explains why attempts at philosophical analysis tend to fall short of providing a complete and uncontroversial definition, and supplies reasons not to lament this apparent shortcoming.
  68. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  69. Natural Kind Concepts.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 75-96.
  70. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  71. Acknowledgments.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 337-338.
  72. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  73. The Life and Death of Secondary Categories.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 295-326.
  74. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  75. Learning without the Senses.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 271-294.
  76. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  77. Against Essential Natures.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 211-226.
  78. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  79. Substance: Philosophical Categories.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 251-270.
  80. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  81. Inductivism versus Conceptual Analysis.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 117-132.
  82. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  83. Substance: Basic Natural Kinds.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 227-250.
  84. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  85. Index.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 339-348.
  86. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  87. Inductive Analysis.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 133-148.
  88. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  89. References.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 327-336.
  90. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  91. The Travails of Analysis.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 185-210.
  92. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  93. Reference.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 149-184.
  94. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  95. The Psychology of Philosophy.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 63-74.
  96. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  97. Philosophical Knowledge.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 1-22.
  98. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  99. Conceptual Inductivism.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 97-116.
  100. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  101. Other Forms of Conceptual Analysis.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 49-62.
  102. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  103. Classical and Modern Conceptual Analysis.Michael Strevens - 2019 - In Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. pp. 23-48.
  104. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  105. P-curving x-phi: Does experimental philosophy have evidential value?Michael T. Stuart, David Colaço & Edouard Machery - 2019 - Analysis 79 (4):669-684.
    In this article, we analyse the evidential value of the corpus of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophers claim that their studies provide insight into philosophical problems, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concerns that the findings from these studies lack evidential value. Barriers to evidential value include selection bias and p-hacking. To find out whether the significant findings in x-phi papers result from selection bias or p-hacking, we applied a p-curve analysis to a corpus of 365 x-phi chapters and articles. Our results suggest that this corpus has evidential value, although there are hints of p-hacking in a few parts of the x-phi corpus.
  106. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  107. (1 other version)Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental Philosophy.Florian Cova, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, James Andow, Mario Attie, James Beebe, Renatas Berniūnas, Jordane Boudesseul, Matteo Colombo, Fiery Cushman, Rodrigo Diaz, Noah N’Djaye Nikolai van Dongen, Vilius Dranseika, Brian D. Earp, Antonio Gaitán Torres, Ivar Hannikainen, José V. Hernández-Conde, Wenjia Hu, François Jaquet, Kareem Khalifa, Hanna Kim, Markus Kneer, Joshua Knobe, Miklos Kurthy, Anthony Lantian, Shen-yi Liao, Edouard Machery, Tania Moerenhout, Christian Mott, Mark Phelan, Jonathan Phillips, Navin Rambharose, Kevin Reuter, Felipe Romero, Paulo Sousa, Jan Sprenger, Emile Thalabard, Kevin Tobia, Hugo Viciana, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Xiang Zhou - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1):45-48.
    Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
  108. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  109. Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental Philosophy.Florian Cova, Brent Strickland, Angela Abatista, Aurélien Allard, James Andow, Mario Attie, James Beebe, Renatas Berniūnas, Jordane Boudesseul, Matteo Colombo, Fiery Cushman, Rodrigo Diaz, Noah N’Djaye Nikolai van Dongen, Vilius Dranseika, Brian D. Earp, Antonio Gaitán Torres, Ivar Hannikainen, José V. Hernández-Conde, Wenjia Hu, François Jaquet, Kareem Khalifa, Hanna Kim, Markus Kneer, Joshua Knobe, Miklos Kurthy, Anthony Lantian, Shen-yi Liao, Edouard Machery, Tania Moerenhout, Christian Mott, Mark Phelan, Jonathan Phillips, Navin Rambharose, Kevin Reuter, Felipe Romero, Paulo Sousa, Jan Sprenger, Emile Thalabard, Kevin Tobia, Hugo Viciana, Daniel Wilkenfeld & Xiang Zhou - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-36.
    Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.
  110. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  111. Intuitions, reflective judgments, and experimental philosophy.Michael Hannon - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):4147-4168.
    Experimental philosophers are often puzzled as to why many armchair philosophers question the philosophical significance of their research. Armchair philosophers, in contrast, are often puzzled as to why experimental philosophers think their work sheds any light on traditional philosophical problems. I argue there is truth on both sides.
  112. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  113. Review of Avner Baz, The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. [REVIEW]Nat Hansen - 2018 - Mind 128 (511):963-970.
    This is the second book by Baz that aims to show that a big chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. His first book, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (2012) adopted a therapeutic approach (in the Wittgensteinian style) to problems in contemporary epistemology, arguing that when properly thought through, the way philosophers talk about ‘knowing’ that something is the case ultimately does not make sense. Baz’s goal in his second book is less therapeutic and more constructive: he aims to start a methodological revolution (in the Kuhnian sense)—to shake contemporary philosophers out of the unconscious habits of normal science and provoke them into making a radical change in the methods they use to do philosophy and the basic assumptions that motivate those methods.
  114. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  115. (1 other version)“Nobody would really talk that way!”: the critical project in contemporary ordinary language philosophy.Nat Hansen - 2018 - Synthese 197 (6):2433-2464.
    This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language.
  116. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  117. Who's Afraid of Trolleys?Antti Kauppinen - 2018 - In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen, Methodology and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
    Recent empirical studies of philosophers by Eric Schwitzgebel and others have seriously called into question whether professional ethicists have any useful expertise with thought experiments, given that their intuitions appear to be no more reliable than those of lay subjects. Drawing on such results, sceptics like Edouard Machery argue that normative ethics as it is currently practiced is deeply problematic. In this paper, I present two main arguments in defense of the standard methodology of normative ethics. First, there is strong reason to believe that expertise with thought experiments requires considering scenarios in their proper theoretical context and in parallel with other pertinent situations, so that we should not expect philosophers to be better than lay folk at responding to decontextualized cases. Second, skeptical views underestimate the epistemic benefits of the actual practices of post-processing initial verdicts both at individual and social levels. Contrary to a mythical conception of ‘the method of cases’, philosophers are frequently sensitive to the quality of intuitive evidence, reject and revise their verdicts on the basis of independently supported principles or interpersonal criticism, and defer to recognized specialists.
  118. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  119. Thought Experiments in Experimental Philosophy.Kirk Ludwig - 2018 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown, The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 385-405.
    Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n.
  120. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  121. Review of Edouard Machery, Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds.Margot Strohminger - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 8.
  122. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  123. The experimental critique and philosophical practice.Tinghao Wang - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (1):89-109.
    Some experimental philosophers have criticized the standard intuition-based methodology in philosophy. One worry about this criticism is that it is just another version of the general skepticism toward the evidential efficacy of intuition, and is thereby subject to the same difficulties. In response, Weinberg provides a more nuanced version of the criticism by targeting merely the philosophical use of intuition. I contend that, though Weinberg’s approach differs from general skepticism about intuition, its focus on philosophical practices gives rise to a new difficulty. Most extant experimental surveys investigate intuitions about particular cases through vignettes giving little contextual information. However, philosophical practices crucially depend on intuitions about general claims and typically provide more contextual background. I argue that, due to these two differences between surveys’ and philosophers’ appeals to intuition, Weinberg’s critique lacks enough support from current experimental data. I conclude that experimental philosophers who engage in the negative program should pay more attention on testing philosophers’ use of general intuitions and context-rich intuitions.
  124. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  125. SEEKING PHILOSOPHY – BY WORDS 2 Questions and Fake Problems.Ulrich De Balbian - 2017 - Oxford: Academic Publishers.
    An exploration of philosophy, its subject-matter (and development of new objects of study and investigation or philosophizing, for example experimental ‘philosophy’, inter-disciplinary work such as in the discourse of cognitive research and philosophy of everything, i e the arts, sport, religion, sex, love, politics, etc), its methods and confines, both internal and external linits, eg cognitive biases, fallacies, -isms, one-dimensionality, uni-levelled, etc. Philosophy - institutionalization, Professionalization, subject-matter, methods, cognitive biases, fallacies.
  126. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  127. Experimental Philosophy, Folk Metaethics and Qualitative Methods.David Moss - 2017 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 36 (3):185-203.
    The file associated with this record is under embargo while permission to archive is sought from the publisher. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.
  128. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  129. (1 other version)Intuition.Joel Pust - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This entry addresses the nature and epistemological role of intuition by considering the following questions: (1) What are intuitions?, (2) What roles do they serve in philosophical (and other “armchair”) inquiry?, (3) Ought they serve such roles?, (4) What are the implications of the empirical investigation of intuitions for their proper roles?, and (5) What is the content of intuitions prompted by the consideration of hypothetical cases?
  130. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  131. Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Derk Pereboom - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 142–157.
    The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism.
  132. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  133. General Introduction to \"A Companion to Experimental Philosophy\".Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    This is the general introduction to the edited collection \"A companion to Experimental Philosophy\".
  134. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  135. Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge.Joachim Horvath & Alex Wiegmann - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (10):2701-2726.
    Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct strategies for assessing the expertise defense are preferable to indirect strategies. A direct argument in support of the expertise defense would have to show: first, that there is a significant difference between expert and lay intuitions; second, that expert intuitions are superior to lay intuitions; and third, that expert intuitions accord with the relevant philosophical consensus. At present, there is only little experimental evidence that bears on these issues. To advance the debate, we conducted two new experiments on intuitions about knowledge with experts and lay people. Our results suggest that the intuitions of epistemological experts are superior in some respects, but they also pose an unexpected challenge to the expertise defense. Most strikingly, we found that even epistemological experts tend to ascribe knowledge in fake-barn-style cases. This suggests that philosophy, as a discipline, might fail to adequately map the intuitions of its expert practitioners onto a disciplinary consensus.
  136. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  137. Intuitive Evidence and Experimental Philosophy.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2016 - In Jennifer Nado, Advances in Experimental Philosophy & Philosophical Methodology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 155–73.
    In recent years, some defenders of traditional philosophical methodology have argued that certain critiques of armchair methods are mistaken in assuming that intuitions play central evidential roles in traditional philosophical methods. According to this kind of response, experimental philosophers attack a straw man; it doesn’t matter whether intuitions are reliable, because philosophers don’t use intuitions in the way assumed. Deutsch (2010), Williamson (2007), and Cappelen (2012) all defend traditional methods in something like this way. I also endorsed something like this line in Ichikawa (2014a).

    In this contribution, I will follow up on this sort of defence of traditional philosophical methods in three ways. In §1, I will rehearse and extend some of my reasons for challenging the idea that traditional methods depend on intuitions in an evidential role. (My reasons are very different from those discussed in (Cappelen, 2012).) I will also engage with some recent more sophisticated attempts to establish the idea that intuitions play evidential roles in philosophy, such as that of Chudnoff (2013). In §2, I will consider and argue against a dismissive response to such positions from experimental philosophers, who consider the question of philosophical reliance on intuitions to be irrelevant to the experimentalist critique. But in §3, I will argue that it would also be a mistake to conclude (as Herman Cappelen does) that the critique is rendered totally irrelevant by the denial of the evidential role of intuitions; I defend a more moderate view on which the bearing of experimental studies of philosophical intuitions is relevant for philosophical methodology, but only in a relatively limited way.

  138. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  139. The myth of the intuitive: Experimental philosophy and philosophical method, by Max Deutsch (MIT Press, 2015).Kevin Lynch - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (7):1088-1091.
  140. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  141. Einführung in die experimentelle Philosophie.Nikil Mukerji - 2016 - Brill Fink.
    Wie kann ein Experiment zur Beantwortung philosophischer Fragestellungen beitragen? Etwa: Was ist Wissen? Was bedeuten sprachliche Ausdrücke? Haben wir einen freien Willen? Kann man etwas absichtlich tun, ohne es zu beabsichtigen? Vertreter einer jungen philosophischen Bewegung wollen den Fragen ihres Fachs mithilfe empirisch-psychologischer Methoden auf den Grund gehen. Anstatt den Lehnstuhl (»armchair«) aufzusuchen, um sich philosophischen Problemen zu widmen, begeben sich experimentelle Philosophen ins Labor, um mithilfe empirischer Informationen aus Psychologie, Neurowissenschaft und Kognitionswissenschaft philosophische Schlussfolgerungen zu stützen. Die Einführung gibt einen anschaulichen Einblick in das neue Forschungsfeld der XPhi und stellt wichtige experimentelle Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie, Philosophie des Geistes und Handlungstheorie vor. In den Blick genommen wird außerdem die florierende metaphilosophische Debatte, die zwischen experimentellen Philosophen und ihren Kritikern geführt wird.
  142. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  143. Armchair-Friendly Experimental Philosophy.Jennifer Nagel & Kaija Mortensen - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 53-70.
    Once symbolized by a burning armchair, experimental philosophy has in recent years shifted away from its original hostility to traditional methods. Starting with a brief historical review of the experimentalist challenge to traditional philosophical practice, this chapter looks at research undercutting that challenge, and at ways in which experimental work has evolved to complement and strengthen traditional approaches to philosophical questions.
  144. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  145. Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition.Stephen Stich & Kevin P. Tobia - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 3–21.
    Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. It explores what are philosophical intuitions, and why do experimental philosophers want to study them using the methods of empirical science. The positive program in experimental philosophy shares the goal of the substantial part of traditional philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of important philosophical concepts. The negative program has implications for philosophical projects whose goal is conceptual analysis. There have been a number of responses to the challenge posed by experimental philosophy's negative program. The chapter also focuses on the expertise defense.
  146. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  147. Philosophical Criticisms of Experimental Philosophy.Timothy Williamson - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma, Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 22–36.
    The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is the so‐called negative program's critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since the negative program has been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordinary judgments about real‐life cases, the critique is in immediate danger of generating into global scepticism, because all human judgments turn out to depend on intuitions. Recently, some proponents of the negative program have tried to demarcate the target of their critique more narrowly. However, their attempts are still far too indiscriminate, and over‐generate scepticism. Nevertheless, once experimental philosophy has refined its own methodology, it may contribute to the refinement of the methodology of mainstream philosophy, by filtering out the effects of cognitive bias, although it offers no prospect of doing without judgments on real or imaginary cases.
  148. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  149. (1 other version)Thin, fine and with sensitivity: a metamethodology of intuitions.James Andow - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1:1-21.
    Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better.
  150. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  151. The Myth of the Intuitive.Max Deutsch - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
    This book is a defense of the methods of analytic philosophy against a recent empirical challenge to the soundness of those methods. The challenge is raised by practitioners of “experimental philosophy” and concerns the extent to which analytic philosophy relies on intuition—in particular, the extent to which analytic philosophers treat intuitions as evidence in arguing for philosophical conclusions. Experimental philosophers say that analytic philosophers place a great deal of evidential weight on people’s intuitions about hypothetical cases and thought experiments. This book argues that this view of traditional philosophical method is a myth, part of “metaphilosophical folklore.” Analytic philosophy makes regular use of hypothetical examples and thought experiments, but philosophers argue for their claims about what is true or not true in these examples and thought experiments. It is these arguments, not intuitions, that are treated as evidence for the claims. The book discusses xphi and some recent xphi studies; critiques a variety of other metaphilosophical claims; examines such famous arguments as Gettier’s refutation of the JTB theory and Kripke’s Gödel Case argument against descriptivism about proper names, and shows that they rely on reasoning rather than intuition; and finds existing critiques of xphi, the “Multiple Concepts” and “Expertise” replies, to be severely lacking.
  152. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  153. Gedankenexperimente, experimentelle Philosophie und philosophische Expertise.Martin Grajner - 2015 - Jahrbuch der Ethik Und Didaktik der Philosophie 15:89-109.
    In this article, I assess the so-called expertise response to the findings of experimental restrictionists.
  154. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  155. The Argument from Self-Defeating Beliefs Against Deontology.Emilian Mihailov - 2015 - Ethical Perspectives 22 (4):573-600.
    There is a tendency to use data from neuroscience, cognitive science and experimental psychology to rail against philosophical ethics. Recently, Joshua Greene has argued that deontological judgments tend to be supported by emotional responses to irrelevant features, whereas consequentialist judgments are more reliable because they tend to be supported by cognitive processes. In this article, I will analyse the evidence used by Greene to suggest a different kind of argument against deontology, which I will call the argument from self-defeating beliefs. The charge of this type of argument amounts to exposing a psychological nature of deontological judgements that is supposedly rejected by deontologists. I will argue that the alleged evidence is poorly understood, mixed and indeterminate, failing to endorse general conclusions about the psychological processes underlying deontological judgements.
  156. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  157. How not to test for philosophical expertise.Regina Rini - 2015 - Synthese 192 (2):431-452.
    Recent empirical work appears to suggest that the moral intuitions of professional philosophers are just as vulnerable to distorting psychological factors as are those of ordinary people. This paper assesses these recent tests of the ‘expertise defense’ of philosophical intuition. I argue that the use of familiar cases and principles constitutes a methodological problem. Since these items are familiar to philosophers, but not ordinary people, the two subject groups do not confront identical cognitive tasks. Reflection on this point shows that these findings do not threaten philosophical expertise—though we can draw lessons for more effective empirical tests.
  158. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  159. X - Phi and Carnapian Explication.Joshua Shepherd & James Justus - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (2):381-402.
    The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and logical concepts, but many concepts of interest to philosophers are essentially normative. With formal epistemology as a case study, we show how x-phi assisted explication can apply to normative domains.
  160. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  161. X-Phi Without Intuitions?Herman Cappelen - 2014 - In Anthony Robert Booth & Darrell P. Rowbottom, Intuitions. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
    One central purpose of Experimental Philosophy (hereafter, x-phi) is to criticize the alleged reliance on intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In my book Philosophy without Intuitions (hereafter, PWI), I argue that philosophers don’t rely on intuitions. If those arguments are good, experimental philosophy has been engaged in an attack on a strawman. The goal of this paper is to bolster the criticism of x-phi in the light of responses.
  162. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  163. Reply to Boghossian, Brogaard and Richard.Herman Cappelen - 2014 - Analytic Philosophy 55 (4):407-421.
    I reply to commentaries on my book Philosophy Without Intuitions from Paul Boghossian, Berit Brogaard, and Mark Richard.
  164. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  165. Who needs intuitions? Two Experimentalist Critiques.Jonathan Ichikawa - 2014 - In Anthony Robert Booth & Darrell P. Rowbottom, Intuitions. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 232-256.
    A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the role of intuitions in the epistemology of armchair philosophy has been exaggerated. This suggestion is rehearsed and endorsed. What bearing does the rejection of the centrality of intuition in armchair philosophy have on experimentalist critiques of the latter? I distinguish two very different kinds of experimentalist critique: one critique requires the centrality of intuition; the other does not.
  166. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  167. Analogies, Moral Intuitions, and the Expertise Defence.Regina A. Rini - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2):169-181.
    The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself.
  168. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  169. Philosophy as the behaviorist views it?Hannes Rusch - 2014 - In Christoph Lütge, Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl, Experimental Ethics: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy. London, England: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 264-282.
    This chapter discusses future directions which the current developments within philosophy might take. It does so on the background of historical parallels to the controversy around experimental philosophy. Historical debates in psychology and economics contain astonishing similarities to today’s discussions in philosophy. After a brief historical overview, four central criticisms which experimental philosophy is subject to are systematically reviewed. It is shown that three of these are not specifically philosophical. Rather, they neccessarily accompany and drive every introduction of experimental methods to a discipline. Only the question if experimental methods can actually capture the objects of philosophical research remains as a – weak – candidate for a specifically philosophical problem. This question is discussed separately. Finally, a constructively critical pluralism of methods is advocated and more serenity demanded: Introducing experimental methods to philosophy is an experiment itself. We will simply have to wait and see if it succeeds.
  170. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  171. In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist Manifesto.Andrew Chapman, Addison Ellis, Robert Hanna, Henry Pickford & Tyler Hildebrand - 2013 - London: Palgrave MacMillan.
    A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them.
  172. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  173. Virtue, Intuition, and Philosophical Methodology.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2013 - In John Turri, Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Springer. pp. 1-20.
    This chapter considers Ernest Sosa’s contributions to philosophical methodology. In Section 1, Sosa’s approach to the role of intuitions in the epistemology of philosophy is considered and related to his broader virtue-theoretic epistemological framework. Of particular focus is the question whether false or unjustified intuitions may justify. Section 2 considers Sosa’s response to sceptical challenges about intuitions, especially those deriving from experimental philosophy. I argue that Sosa’s attempt to attribute apparent disagreement in survey data to difference in meaning fails, but that some of his other, more general, responses to experimentalist sceptics succeed.
  174. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  175. Experimental Philosophy and Apriority.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2013 - In Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow, The a Priori in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 45-66.
    One of the more visible recent developments in philosophical methodology is the experimental philosophy movement. On its surface, the experimentalist challenge looks like a dramatic threat to the apriority of philosophy; ‘experimentalist’ is nearly antonymic with ‘aprioristic’. This appearance, I suggest, is misleading; the experimentalist critique is entirely unrelated to questions about the apriority of philosophical investigation. There are many reasons to resist the skeptical conclusions of negative experimental philosophers; but even if they are granted—even if the experimentalists are right to claim that we must do much more careful laboratory work in order legitimately to be confident in our philosophical judgments— the apriority of philosophy is unimpugned. The kinds of scientific investigation that experimental philosophers argue to be necessary involve merely enabling sensory experiences. Although they are not enabling in the sense of permitting concept acquisition, they are enabling in another epistemically significant way that is also consistent with the apriority of philosophy.
  176. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  177. Negatywny program filozofii eksperymentalnej a odwołania do intuicji w argumentacji filozoficznej.Joanna Komorowska-Mach - 2013 - Filozofia Nauki 21 (3 (83)):157-165.
  178. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  179. Methods in analytic epistemology.Kirk Ludwig - 2013 - In Matthew C. Haug, Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? New York: Routledge. pp. 217-239.
    In this chapter, I defend the program of conceptual analysis, broadly construed, and the method of thought experiments in epistemology, as a first-person enterprise, that is, as one which draws on the investigator's own competence in the relevant concepts. I do not suggest that epistemology is limited to conceptual analysis, that it does not have important a posteriori elements, that it should not draw on empirical work wherever relevant (and non-question begging), or that it is not a communal enterprise. Although discussion in the space available will necessarily be brief, and many points must be elided altogether, I aim to sketch salient features of the landscape, clarify issues, set aside some confusions, and outline responses to some recent challenges. In §2, I sketch a traditional account of concepts and conceptual truths. In §3, I review a broad conception of analysis as encompassing not just reduction but also articulation of conceptual connections. In §4, I address the charge that in studying epistemic concepts we turn away from our proper target of study, the actual phenomena of knowledge, justification, and so on. In §5, I give a brief overview of the method of thought experiments. In §6, I address objections to thought experiments that have their source in "experimental philosophy." In §7, I address the charge that pursuing conceptual analysis in epistemology is misplaced because 'knowledge', 'justification', 'evidence' and so on, are natural kind terms, and hence that we must engage in empirical research to discover the real essences of the kinds they pick out (if any).
  180. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  181. The Folk Probably do Think What you Think They Think.David Manley, Billy Dunaway & Anna Edmonds - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (3):421-441.
    Much of experimental philosophy consists of surveying 'folk' intuitions about philosophically relevant issues. Are the results of these surveys evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’? We found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results claimed to be 'surprising'. But, we argue, this does not mean that such experiments have no role at all in philosophy.
  182. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  183. Defending the Evidential Value of Epistemic Intuitions: A Reply to Stich.Jennifer Nagel - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1):179-199.
    Do epistemic intuitions tell us anything about knowledge? Stich has argued that we respond to cases according to our contingent cultural programming, and not in a manner that tends to reveal anything significant about knowledge itself. I’ve argued that a cross-culturally universal capacity for mindreading produces the intuitive sense that the subject of a case has or lacks knowledge. This paper responds to Stich’s charge that mindreading is cross-culturally varied in a way that will strip epistemic intuitions of their evidential value. I argue that existing work on cross-cultural variation in mindreading favors my position over Stich’s.
  184. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  185. The 'Gödel' effect.Gary Ostertag - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):65-82.
    In their widely discussed paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style”, Machery et al. argue that Kripke’s Gödel–Schmidt case, generally thought to undermine the description theory of names, rests on culturally variable intuitions: while Western subjects’ intuitions conflict with the description theory of names, those of East Asian subjects do not. Machery et al. attempt to explain this discrepancy by appealing to differences between Western and East Asian modes of categorization, as identified in an influential study by Nisbett et al. I claim that these differences fail to explain the conflicting intuitions. Moreover, Machery et al.’s initial conjecture—that the relevant cultural differences would manifest themselves in differing semantic intuitions—is legitimate only if we assume that the Gödel–Schmidt case is used both to undermine descriptivism and establish the causal theory. But, as I argue, this is not Kripke’s intention. This misunderstanding persists in the recent clarification of their views in “If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What?” (Machery et al., Philos Phenomenol Res, 2012).
  186. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  187. In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy.David Rose & David Danks - 2013 - Metaphilosophy 44 (4):512-532.
    Experimental philosophy is often presented as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. This article distinguishes two views of experimental philosophy: a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions, and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the colocation in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both pro and con. The article argues, first, that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. It then shows both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting a broad conception of experimental philosophy.
  188. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  189. Two Potential Problems with Philosophical Intuitions: Muddled Intuitions and Biased Intuitions.Jeanine Weekes Schroer & Robert Schroer - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1263-1281.
    One critique of experimental philosophy is that the intuitions of the philosophically untutored should be accorded little to no weight; instead, only the intuitions of professional philosophers should matter. In response to this critique, “experimentalists” often claim that the intuitions of professional philosophers are biased. In this paper, we explore this question of whose intuitions should be disqualified and why. Much of the literature on this issue focuses on the question of whether the intuitions of professional philosophers are reliable. In contrast, we instead focus on the idea of “muddled” intuitions—i.e. intuitions that are misdirected and about notions other than the ones under discussion. We argue that the philosophically untutored are likely to have muddled intuitions and that professional philosophers are likely to have unmuddled intuitions. Although being umuddled does not, by itself, establish the reliability of the intuitions of professional philosophers, being muddled is enough to disqualify the intuitions of the philosophically untutored. We then turn to the charge that, despite being unmuddled, professional philosophers still have biased intuitions. To evaluate this charge, we switch focus from the general notion of biased intuition to the more specific notion of theory-laden intuition. We argue that there is prima facie evidence—in the form of the presence of conflicts of intuition—for thinking that at least some of the intuitions of professional philosophers are theory-laden. In summary, we conclude that that there is no clean and easy answer to the question of whose intuitions should matter.
  190. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  191. Reforming intuition pumps: when are the old ways the best?Brian Talbot - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):315-334.
    One mainstream approach to philosophy involves trying to learn about philosophically interesting, non-mental phenomena—ethical properties, for example, or causation—by gathering data from human beings. I call this approach “wide tent traditionalism.” It is associated with the use of philosophers’ intuitions as data, the making of deductive arguments from this data, and the gathering of intuitions by eliciting reactions to often quite bizarre thought experiments. These methods have been criticized—I consider experimental philosophy’s call for a move away from the use of philosophers’ intuitions as evidence, and recent suggestions about the use of inductive arguments in philosophy—and these criticisms point out important areas for improvement. However, embracing these reforms in turn gives wide-tent traditionalists strong reasons to maintain other traditional approaches to philosophy. Specifically, traditionalists’ commitment to using intuitions and to gathering them with bizarre thought experiments is well founded, both philosophically and empirically. I end by considering some problems with gathering trustworthy intuitions, and give suggestions about how best to solve them.
  192. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  193. Experimental Philosophy: A Methodological Critique.Robert L. Woolfolk - 2013 - Metaphilosophy 44 (1-2):79-87.
    This article offers a critique of research practices typical of experimental philosophy. To that end, it presents a review of methodological issues that have proved crucial to the quality of research in the biobehavioral sciences. It discusses various shortcomings in the experimental philosophy literature related to (1) the credibility of self-report questionnaires, (2) the validity and reliability of measurement, (3) the adherence to appropriate procedures for sampling, random assignment, and handling of participants, and (4) the meticulousness of study reporting. It argues that the future standing of experimental philosophy will hinge upon improvements in research methods.
  194. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  195. Tracking instability in our philosophical judgments: Is it intuitive?Jennifer Wright - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (4):485-501.
    Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry fueled by the empirical discovery of irrational bias (e.g., the order effect) in people's judgments has recently been challenged by research suggesting that people can introspectively track intuitional instability. The two studies reported here build upon this, the first by demonstrating that people are able to introspectively track instability that was experimentally induced by introducing conflicting expert opinion about certain cases, and the second by demonstrating that it was the presence of instability?not merely the presence of conflicting information?that resulted in changes in the relevant attitudinal states (i.e., confidence and belief strength). The paper closes with the suggestion that perhaps the best explanation for these (and other) findings may be that intuitional instability is not actually ?intuitional.?
  196. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  197. Experimental Attacks on Intuitions and Answers.John Bengson - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3):495-532.
    This paper poses a constructive, evenhanded challenge to the idea that recent experimental work shows intuitions to be epistemically problematic. It is a challenge because it suggests that these experimental attacks neglect a considerable gap between intuitions and answers, and this neglect implies that we are at the present time unwarranted in drawing any negative conclusions about intuition’s epistemic status from the relevant empirical studies. The challenge is evenhanded because it does not load the dice by invoking an overly narrow conception of intuition. Finally, the challenge is constructive: it is not an exercise in idle skepticism, but rather explores concrete implications and applications. These include (i) a practical lesson that may help experimentalists in their efforts to study intuitions empirically, (ii) methodological counsel that may help rationalists in their efforts to intuit responsibly, and (iii) a novel explanation of the relevant empirical studies that may actually support rather than undermine intuition’s epistemic status—perhaps, however, to the detriment of the epistemic status of answers.
  198. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  199. Experimental Philosophy and its Critics.Joachim Horvath & Thomas Grundmann (eds.) - 2012 - Routledge.
    Experimental philosophy is one of the most recent and controversial developments in philosophy. Its basic idea is rather simple: to test philosophical thought experiments and philosophers’ intuitions about them with scientific methods, mostly taken from psychology and the social sciences. The ensuing experimental results, such as the cultural relativity of certain philosophical intuitions, has engaged – and at times infuriated – many more traditionally minded \"armchair\" philosophers since then. In this volume, the metaphilosophical reflection on experimental philosophy is brought yet another step forward by engaging some of its most renowned proponents and critics in a lively and controversial debate. In addition to that, the volume also contains original experimental research on personal identity and philosophical temperament, as well as state-of-the-art essays on central metaphilosophical issues, like thought experiments, the nature of intuitions, or the status of philosophical expertise. -/- This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Psychology.
  200. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  201. Experimentalist pressure against traditional methodology.Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):743 - 765.
    According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing too widely. Such critiques are more reasonable, and more worthy of serious consideration, than are blunter critiques that generalize far too widely. I argue that a careful (empirical!) examination of extant philosophical practices shows that traditional philosophical methods can meet these more reasonable challenges.
  202. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  203. Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology.Jennifer Nagel - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3):495-527.
    Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions.
  204. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  205. Intuition, Thought Experiments, and Philosophical Method: Feminism and Experimental Philosophy.Lisa H. Schwartzman - 2012 - Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (3):307-316.
  206. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  207. Experimenter Philosophy: the Problem of Experimenter Bias in Experimental Philosophy.Brent Strickland & Aysu Suben - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3):457-467.
    It has long been known that scientists have a tendency to conduct experiments in a way that brings about the expected outcome. Here, we provide the first direct demonstration of this type of experimenter bias in experimental philosophy. Opposed to previously discovered types of experimenter bias mediated by face-to-face interactions between experimenters and participants, here we show that experimenters also have a tendency to create stimuli in a way that brings about expected outcomes. We randomly assigned undergraduate experimenters to receive two different hypotheses about folk intuitions of consciousness, and then asked them to design experiments based on their hypothesis. Specifically, experimenters generated sentences ascribing intentional and phenomenal mental states to groups, which were later rated by online participants for naturalness. We found a significant interaction between experimenter hypothesis and participant ratings indicating a general tendency for experimenters to obtain the result that they expected. These results indicate that experimenter bias is a real problem in experimental philosophy since the methods and design employed here mirror the predominant survey methods of the field as a whole. The bearing of the current results on Knobe and Prinz’s :67–83, 2008) group mind hypothesis is discussed, and new methods for avoiding experimenter bias are proposed.
  208. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  209. A New Hope for Philosophers' Appeal to Intuition.Damián Enrique Szmuc - 2012 - Essays in Philosophy 13 (1):336-353.
    Some recent researches in experimental philosophy have posed a problem for philosophers’ appeal to intuition (hereinafter referred to as PAI); the aim of this paper is to offer an answer to this challenge. The thesis against PAI implies that, given some experimental results, intuition does not seem to be a reliable epistemic source, and —more importantly— given the actual state of knowledge about its operation, we do not have sufficient resources to mitigate its errors and thus establish its reliability. That is why PAI is hopeless. Throughout this paper I will defend my own conception of PAI, which I have called the Deliberative Conception, and consequently, I will defend intersubjective agreement as a means to mitigate PAI errors, offering empirical evidence from recent studies on the Argumentative Theory of Reason that favor the conception I defend here. Finally, I will reply to some objections that might arise against the Deliberative Conception, which will lead me to discuss some metaphilosophical issues that are significantly relevant for the future of the dispute about the appeal to intuition.
  210. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  211. In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma.Jonathan Ichikawa, Ishani Maitra & Brian Weatherson - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1):56-68.
    In “Against Arguments from Reference” (Mallon et al., 2009), Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-historical theory; though the two theories are empirically testable, we need to look at quite different data than MMNS do to decide between them. Second, the Gödel/Schmidt example plays a different, and much smaller, role in Kripke’s argument for the causal-historical theory than MMNS assume. Finally, and relatedly, even if Kripke is wrong about the Gödel/Schmidt example—indeed, even if the causal-historical theory is not the correct theory of names for some human languages—that does not, contrary to MMNS’s claim, undermine uses of the causalhistorical theory in philosophical research projects.
  212. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  213. The Critique from Experimental Philosophy: Can Philosophical Intuitions Be Externally Corroborated?Max Seeger - 2011 - XXII. Deutscher Kongress für Philosophie.
  214. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  215. In memoriam.Tamler Sommers - 2011 - The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52):89-93.
    Experimental philosophy has received a great deal of attention in scholarly journals and the popular media. Often the topic of these articles is precisely what I claim is a non-issue – the value of experimental philosophy as a movement. And here I am writing about this same topic yet again. But I am not going to provide another argument for an obvious position. Instead, I’m writing this as an obituary – an obituary for the so-called controversy about experimental philosophy, and an attempt to diagnose how it lived as long as it did.
  216. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  217. Philosophical expertise and the burden of proof.Timothy Williamson - 2011 - Metaphilosophy 42 (3):215-229.
    Abstract: Some proponents of “experimental philosophy” criticize philosophers' use of thought experiments on the basis of evidence that the verdicts vary with truth-independent factors. However, their data concern the verdicts of philosophically untrained subjects. According to the expertise defence, what matters are the verdicts of trained philosophers, who are more likely to pay careful attention to the details of the scenario and track their relevance. In a recent article, Jonathan M. Weinberg and others reply to the expertise defence that there is no evidence for such expertise. They now receive a reply in this article, which argues that they have misconstrued the dialectical situation. Since they have produced no evidence that philosophical training is less efficacious for thought experimentation than for other cognitive tasks for which they acknowledge that it produces genuine expertise, such as informal argumentation, they have produced no evidence for treating the former more sceptically than the latter.
  218. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  219. (1 other version)Accentuate the Negative.Joshua Alexander, Ronald Mallon & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):297-314.
    Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.
  220. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  221. Survey-Driven Romanticism.Simon Cullen - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):275-296.
    Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys.
  222. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  223. Intuitions, counter-examples, and experimental philosophy.Max Deutsch - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):447-460.
    Practitioners of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ have collected data that appear to show that some philosophical intuitions are culturally variable. Many experimental philosophers take this to pose a problem for a more traditional, ‘armchair’ style of philosophizing. It is argued that this is a mistake that derives from a false assumption about the character of philosophical methods; neither philosophy nor its methods have anything to fear from cultural variability in philosophical intuitions.
  224. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  225. (1 other version)Experimental Appeals to Intuition.Renia Gasparatou - 2010 - Critica 42 (124):31-50.
    Today, experimental philosophers challenge traditional appeals to intuition; they empirically collect folk intuitions and then use their findings to attack philosophers’ intuitions. However this movement is not uniform. Radical experimentalists criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy altogether and they have been mostly attacked. Contrariwise, moderate experimentalists imply that lay persons’ intuitions are somehow relevant to philosophical problems. Sometimes they even use folk intuitions in order to advance theoretical theses. In this paper I will try to challenge the so-called moderate experimental attempts to rely on intuition in order to promote philosophical theses.
  226. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  227. Some hope for intuitions: A reply to Weinberg.Thomas Grundmann - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):481-509.
    In a recent paper Weinberg (2007) claims that there is an essential mark of trustworthiness which typical sources of evidence as perception or memory have, but philosophical intuitions lack, namely that we are able to detect and correct errors produced by these “hopeful” sources. In my paper I will argue that being a hopeful source isn't necessary for providing us with evidence. I then will show that, given some plausible background assumptions, intuitions at least come close to being hopeful, if they are reliable. If this is true, Weinberg's new challenge comes down to the claim that philosophical intuitions are not reliable since they are significantly unstable. In the second part of my paper I will argue that and why the experimentally established instability of folk intuitions about philosophical cases does not show that philosopher's expert intuitions about these cases are instable.
  228. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  229. How (not) to react to experimental philosophy.Joachim Horvath - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):447-480.
    In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the 'master argument'. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call 'conservative restrictionism' as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism.
  230. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  231. Introduction: Experimental Philosophy and Its Critics, Parts 1 and 2.Joachim Horvath & Thomas Grundmann - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (3):283-292.
    In this brief introduction, we would first like to explain how these two special issues of Philosophical Psychology ( 23.3 and 23.4 ) actually came about. In addition, we will provide an outline of their overall structure and shortly summarize the featured papers.
  232. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  233. Intuitions and relativity.Kirk Ludwig - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):427-445.
    I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role of intuitions in philosophical inquiry. When we have done this, we can see that it is impossible for intuitions properly understood to be relative in the way that has been suggested as they are conceived of as expressions of competence in the concepts deployed in their contents. The remaining methodological issues, though not to be dismissed, present no in principle objection to the method of thought experiments.
  234. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  235. On the nature of thought experiments and a core motivation of experimental philosophy.Joseph Shieber - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):547-564.
    In this paper I discuss some underlying motivations common to most strands of experimental philosophy, noting that most forms of experimental philosophy have a commitment to the claim that certain empirical evidence concerning the level of agreement on intuitive judgments across cultures, ethnic groups or socioeconomic strata impugns the role that intuitions play in traditional “armchair” philosophy. I then develop an argument to suggest that, even if one were to grant the truth of the data adduced by experimentalists regarding the level of agreement—or lack thereof—regarding intuitive judgments among various groups, this would nevertheless not yet provide sufficient basis to reject the role of intuitions in traditional philosophical theorizing. Though this argument, if successful, will not prove fatal to all forms of experimental philosophy, it would limit the scope of experimental philosophical criticisms of traditional philosophical practice.
  236. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  237. Intuitions and meaning divergence.Ernest Sosa - 2010 - Philosophical Psychology 23 (4):419-426.
    Survey results are in the first instance utterances, which require interpretation. Moreover, when the results seem to involve disagreement in intuitive responses to a thought experiment, the results are most directly responsive to the scenario as envisaged by the particular subject, where the text of the example can give rise to relevantly different scenarios, depending on how the scenario is shaped by the subjects involved, under the guidance of the text. All of this opens up a defense of intuitions against results that ostensibly imply extensive intuitive disagreement based on cultural or socio-economic background. Critics of the armchair have replied to this defense in recent publications. This paper takes up some of those replies.
  238. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  239. Sinnott-Armstrong’s Moral Skepticism: A Murdochian Response.Gerald Beaulieu - 2009 - Dialogue 48 (3):673-678.
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has recently criticized moral intuitionism by bringing to light some compelling empirical evidence indicating that we are unreliable at forming moral judgments non-inferentially. The evidence shows that our non-inferentially arrived-at moral convictions are subject to framing effects; that is, they vary depending on how the situation judged is described. Thomas Nadelhoffer and Adam Feltz, following in Sinnott-Armstrong's footsteps, have appealed to research indicating that such judgments are also subject to actor-observer bias; that is, they vary depending on whether the situation judged includes the judger as an actor in, or an observer of, the situation. The accuracy of this empirical evidence will not be challenged in what follows. What will be called into question is its purported relevance for moral intuitionism. To that end we will consider a version of moral intuitionism developed by Iris Murdoch that not only accommodates but essentially relies on the existence of various kinds of distorting factors including framing effects and actor-observer bias.
  240. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  241. Experimental philosophy and the theory of reference.Max Deutsch - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (4):445-466.
    It is argued on a variety of grounds that recent results in 'experimental philosophy of language', which appear to show that there are significant cross-cultural differences in intuitions about the reference of proper names, do not pose a threat to a more traditional mode of philosophizing about reference. Some of these same grounds justify a complaint about experimental philosophy as a whole.
  242. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  243. Experimental philosophy.Janet Levin - 2009 - Analysis 69 (4):761-769.
    Levin argues that the results of the most methodologically sound and philosophically relevant studies discussed in this volume [ Experimental Philosophy] could have been obtained from the armchair, and thus that experimental philosophy may not present a serious challenge to the traditional methods of analytic philosophy.
  244. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  245. Psychology and the Use of Intuitions in Philosophy.Brian Talbot - 2009 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2):157-176.
    There is widespread controversy about the use of intuitions in philosophy. In this paper I will argue that there are legitimate concerns about this use, and that these concerns cannot be fully responded to using the traditional methods of philosophy. We need an understanding of how intuitions are generated and what it is they are based on, and this understanding must be founded on the psychological investigation of the mind. I explore how a psychological understanding of intuitions is likely to impact a range of philosophical projects, from conceptual analysis to the study of (non-conceptual) "things themselves" to experimental philosophy.
  246. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  247. Folk Feminist Theory: An Experimental Approach.Peggy Desautels - 2008 - Hypatia 23 (4):240-244.
  248. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  249. Review of Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy[REVIEW]Frank Jackson - 2008 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (12).
  250. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  251. A defense of intuitions.S. Matthew Liao - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (2):247 - 262.
    Radical experimentalists argue that we should give up using intuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I first argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact suggest that some intuitions are reliable. I next consider and reject a different way of handling the radical experimentalists' challenge, what I call the Argument from Robust Intuitions. I then propose a way of understanding why some intuitions can be unreliable and how intuitions can conflict, and I argue that on this understanding, both moderate experimentalism and the standard philosophical practice of using intuitions as evidence can help resolve these conflicts.
  252. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  253. Experimental philosophers, conceptual analysts, and the rest of us.François Schroeter - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (2):143-149.
    In an interesting recent exchange, Antti Kauppinen (2007) disagrees with Thomas Nadelhoffer and Eddy Nahmias (2007) over the prospects of experimental methods in philosophy. Kauppinen's critique of experimental philosophy is premised on an endorsement of a priori conceptual analysis. This premise has shaped the trajectory of their debate. In this note, I consider what foes of conceptual analysis will have to say about their exchange.
  254. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  255. (1 other version)Intuition and philosophical methodology.John Symons - 2008 - Axiomathes 18 (1):67-89.
    Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important role as part of a methodologically conservative stance towards philosophical investigation. I argue that methodological conservatism should be sharply distinguished from the process of evaluating individual propositions. Nevertheless, intuition is not always a reliable guide to truth and experimental philosophy can serve a vital ameliorative role in determining the scope and limits of our intuitive competence with respect to various areas of inquiry.
  256. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  257. The rise and fall of experimental philosophy.Antti Kauppinen - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 10 (2):95 – 118.
    In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical 'intuitions' about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as 'experimental philosophy', rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people's concepts and their linguistic behaviour. The conceptual claims that philosophers make imply predictions about the folk's responses only under certain demanding, counterfactual conditions. Because of the nature of these conditions, the claims cannot be tested with methods of positivist social science. We are, however, entitled to appeal to intuitions about folk concepts in virtue of possessing implicit normative knowledge acquired through reflective participation in everyday linguistic practices.
  258. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  259. The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person versus Third Person Approaches.Kirk Ludwig - 2007 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):128-159.
    Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint.
  260. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  261. (1 other version)Experimental philosophy and philosophical intuition.Ernest Sosa - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (1):99-107.
    The topic is experimental philosophy as a naturalistic movement, and its bearing on the value of intuitions in philosophy. This paper explores first how the movement might bear on philosophy more generally, and how it might amount to something novel and promising. Then it turns to one accomplishment repeatedly claimed for it already: namely, the discrediting of armchair intuitions as used in philosophy.
  262. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  263. (4 other versions)Experimental Philosophy.Wesley Buckwalter, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, N. Ángel Pinillos, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian, Chris Weigel & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2006 - Oxford Bibliographies Online 1:81-92.
    Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.
  264. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  265. Against explanationist skepticism regarding philosophical intuitions.Joel Pust - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 106 (3):227 - 258.
    Though most of analytic philosophy is based upon intuitions, some philosophers are beginning to question whether intuitions are an appropriate basis for philosophical theory. This paper responds to the arguments of some contemporary philosophers who hold that intuitions should not be treated as evidence for anything other than our contingent psychological constitution. It begins with a demonstration that skeptical arguments by Gilbert Harman and Alvin Goldman are variations on an argument with the potential to undermine the use of intuitions in much philosophical inquiry. After a demonstration that Nicholas Sturgeon’s response to Harman’s argument is inadequate, it argues that all of the instances of the skeptical argument are unsuccessful because they are epistemically self-defeating.
  266. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  267. Experimental philosophy and individual differences: Some pitfalls.Colin Klein - unknown
    Reasonable individuals can disagree about philosophical questions. This disagreement sometimes takes the form of conflicting intuitions; the seminar room provides many examples. Experimental philosophers, who have devoted themselves to the systematic study of intuitions, have found empirical support for what anecdotes suggest. Their data often reveals that a significant minority of subjects have intuitions counter to those of the majority.1 A recent replication of [Knobe, 2003a] discovered three distinct subgroups of subjects with three distinct patterns of response. Only about one-third of subjects gave the expected asymmetric responses to Knobestyle probes. The other two-thirds gave symmetric responses to harm and help probes, with about half judging side-effects were intentional in both harm and help cases and half judging that they were intentional in neither [Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007].
  268. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  269. Comment on “How not to test for philosophical expertise”.Wesley Buckwalter - manuscript
    Rini 2015 [Synthese 192, (2): 431-452] claims to have identified a methodological flaw that invalidates the results of two experimental studies [Schwitzgebel & Cushman (2012) Mind and Language 27, (2): 135-153; Tobia, Buckwalter & Stich (2013) Philosophical Psychology 26, (5): 629–638] demonstrating order effects in professional philosophical intuition. This conclusion is reached on the basis of unsupported empirical premises for which no evidence is given. Subsequent findings in experimental cognitive science further reveal this as unsupported speculation.
  270. "; xpapers_embed_buffer += "
  271. All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy: What’s Happening in Philosophy (WHiP)-The Philosophers, September 2022.Jeff Hawley - unknown
    Experimental philosophy (x-phi) is all the rage. But shouldn't all philosophy be experimental? Jeff Hawley looks at the views of three philosophers on the role and value of x-phi. This month’s PhilosophyNews 'WHiP: The Philosophers' focuses on a chapter from The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy edited by A. Bauer and S. Kornmesser (forthcoming). 'All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy' by Justin Sytsma, Joseph Ulatowski, and Chad Gonnerman digs into the history of various philosophers who have argued for the need to go beyond the tradition methods of the ‘armchair’ philosopher and include empirical research into the mix.
  272. "; function xpapers_embed_init() { if (arguments.callee.done) return; arguments.callee.done = true; var el = document.getElementById('xpapers_gadget'); if (el) { el.innerHTML = xpapers_embed_buffer + "
    powered by PhilPapers"; } } if (document.addEventListener) { document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', xpapers_embed_init, false); } (function() { /*@*/ try { document.body.doScroll('up'); return xpapers_embed_init(); } catch(e) {} /* (false) @*/ if (/loaded|complete/.test(document.readyState)) return xpapers_embed_init(); /* @*/ if (!xpapers_embed_init.done) setTimeout(arguments.callee, 30); })(); if (window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener('load', xpapers_embed_init, false); } else if (window.attachEvent) { window.attachEvent('onload', xpapers_embed_init); } //v1.0