Critiques of Experimental Philosophy

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. (shrink)

This is the general introduction to the edited collection "A companion to Experimental Philosophy".

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. (shrink)

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 defining culture, finding representative samples, defining cognition, task variation, ecological validity, interpreting the results, and 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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this paper I undertake to resolve a main pragmatic puzzle triggered by Bank-type cases. After accepting ‘sanitized’ intuitions about Truth-Values, as reflected in x-phi experiments, the pragmatic puzzle about whether the husband is inconsistent remains, and if he isn’t, which intuitively is the case, how are we to explain it. The context in such cases is pragmatic, with awareness of high risks, and the treatment I propose is pragmatic as well, but not Gricean. I offer a new Pragmatics whose (...) main tools are Steering Thrust and Posting. It focuses on what I call Action-Directed Pragmatics. An overall view of Pragmatics centers on the primary resort to Sayability rather than to Truth-Values, and to the Pragmatic phenomenon of co-present operative norm-types, which can conflict in some cases vis-à-vis particular actions and about what subjects can say. The very satisfactory explanation of the above puzzle that I offer is in such terms. In particular, attention is focused on the phenomenon of Negative-Polarity Pragmatic Functors. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds, Édouard Machery argues that the results of experimental philosophy 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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

"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"--. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

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. (shrink)

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.

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 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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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.

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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?

Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For (...) illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this article, I assess the so-called expertise response to the findings of experimental restrictionists.