Some Recent Work in Experimental Epistemology (original) (raw)
Related papers
An overview of the main areas of epistemological debate to which experimental philosophers have been contributing and the larger, philosophical challenges these contributions have raised.
Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Disputes
2012
One view of philosophy that is sometimes expressed, especially by scientists, is that while philosophers are good at asking questions, they are poor at producing convincing answers. And the perceived divide between philosophical and scientific methods is often pointed to as the major culprit behind this lack of progress. Looking back at the history of philosophy, however, we find that this methodological divide is a relatively recent invention. Further, it is one that has been challenged over the past decade by the modern incarnation of experimental philosophy. How might the reincorporation of empirical methods into philosophy aid the process of making philosophical progress? Building off of the work of Sytsma , we argue that one way it does so is by offering a means of resolving some disputes that arise in philosophy. We illustrate how philosophical disputes may sometimes be resolved empirically by looking at the recent experimental literature on intuitions about reference.
The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy
Philosophical Explorations
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.
Thought Experiments and Experimental Philosophy
In recent years, there has been a lot of debate in philosophical methodology about the best rational reconstruction of philosophical thought experiments. Concerning this debate, I argue against the current consensus that our intuitive judgments about Gettier thought experiments should be interpreted in modal terms. In order to provide a non-modal alternative, I present a detailed reconstruction of a paradigmatic Gettier thought experiment in terms of suppositional thinking. Next, I explore a problem that all rational reconstructions must face, namely that there is a large gap between the explicit case description of a thought experiment and our total supposition of the relevant scenario. In the final section, I use these considerations to make room for alternative explanations of some challenging results from experimental philosophy – explanations that are friendlier to the method of thought experimentation than the skeptical conclusions of experimental philosophers of a ‘restrictionist’ stripe.
Experimental Philosophy and Folk Concepts: Methodological Considerations
Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be possible to provide more adequate answers a few years down the line.
Analytic Epistemology and Experimental Philosophy
It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement-experimental philosophy-has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introduce two different views concerning the relationship that holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, the proper foundation view and the restrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy.
Philosophical Criticisms of Experimental Philosophy
The philosophical relevance of experimental psychology is hard to dispute. Much more controversial is some experimental philosophers’ critique of armchair philosophical methodology, in particular the reliance on ‘intuitions’ about thought experiments. This chapter responds to that critique. It argues that, since experimental philosophers have been forced to extend the category of intuition to ordinary judgments about real-life cases, their critique is in immediate danger of generating into global scepticism, because all human judgments turn out to depend on intuitions. Recently, some experimental philosophers 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.
A Dialectical Account of Thought Experiments
2017
In this paper, we defend a dialectical account of thought experiments. First, starting from a fairly broad characterization of what thought experiments are in general, we focus on a tension between two of their characteristics, a tension that puts thought experiments in what we will describe as an ontological state of unstable equilibrium. Second, having interpreted the epistemological debate between James Robert Brown and John Norton in terms of this ontological unstable equilibrium, we will clarify our position in this debate. To put it bluntly, we agree with Norton when he argues against Brown's Platonist positions, but we do not agree with him when he maintains that thought experiments are only arguments in the sense of valid arguments. According to us, scenarios that thought experiments involve always including some kind of opacity that can not be immediately reduced, thought experiments can not be assimilated to arguments. Third, we argue that, to account for the acquisiti...
Intuitions, Counter-Examples, and Experimental Philosophy
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2010
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. Some of the most striking results from the new 'experimental philosophy' movement are those that appear to reveal significant variability, along cultural and other dimensions, in peoples' philosophical intuitions. For example, the experimental philosophers, Weinberg et al. (2001), conducted cross-cultural empirical studies on the Gettier intuition and claim to have found that significant majorities of East Asian and Indian subjects will intuit that an agent in a Gettier case 'really knows', as opposed to 'only believes', the relevant proposition. A different group of experimental philosophers, Machery et al. (2004), undertook cross-cultural experiments on intuitions about reference, and claim to have discovered that East Asians' intuitions strongly favor a descriptivist theory of reference for proper names, while Westerners' intuitions equally strongly support Kripke's (1980) 'causal-historical' alternative. This variability, if it really exists, is interesting in itself, and cries out for some explanation. But what, if anything, does it tell us about philosophical method? Is cross-cultural variability in intuitions something that Gettier and Kripke, for example, should worry about? Some experimental philosophers say that it is. In fact, both groups of experimental philosophers mentioned above use their experimental results to challenge the more traditional, 'armchair' method of Rev.Phil.Psych.