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The Challenge of Experimental Philosophy

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See a fine overview in Mortensen and Nagel (2016:53–71).

  2. 2.

    For a recent overview see the section “Philosophy of Science” in Sytsma and Buckwalter (eds.) (2016).

  3. 3.

    For a useful overview of huge literature on the topic see Buckwalter (2016) (eds.).

  4. 4.

    For a relatively recent list of problems by Alexander et al. (2010).

  5. 5.

    The pioneering works are Weinberg et al. (2001), Nichols et al. (2003a, b), Machery et al. (2004).

  6. 6.

    The main early sources are Haidt (2001), Nichols (2004), Nichols and Knobe (2007), Prinz 2007 (recently summarized in Stich and Tobia (2018:374)).

  7. 7.

    For more see Cova (2016) and Björnsson and Pereboom (2016).

  8. 8.

    For recent short summary see Stich and Tobia (2018:374).

  9. 9.

    A different study by the same authors (Nichols et al. 2003a, b) reported that the number of philosophy courses subjects had taken was a factor in influencing their responses. Subjects who had taken a number of philosophy courses were more susceptible to skeptical arguments than those who had taken fewer.

  10. 10.

    See for instance recent surveys in Greene (2016) and Justin W. Martin and Fiery Cushman The Adaptive Logic of Moral Luck (2016).

  11. 11.

    Some of the more recent comments by X-philosophers are less dramatic. For instance, Stephen Stich and Kevin Tobia recently offered a more modest proposal:

    The skepticism about the use of intuitions as evidence (…) should be directed primarily at intuitions that have been shown to be susceptible to irrelevant influences, and at other intuitions that are the product of psychological mechanisms that are likely to be vulnerable in similar ways. And which are these? The answer is that at this point we do not know, and we are not going to find out without a great deal more sophisticated work in psychology and neuroscience. On our view, this sort of research should be viewed as quite central to experimental philosophy. So the take-home message from this chapter is not that intuitions should not be used as evidence in philosophy. Rather, it is that experimental philosophy, broadly construed, has a crucial role to play in assessing and improving philosophical methodology (2018:379).

  12. 12.

    Here is his complete Argument from dogmatism:

    1. 1.

      Most of the philosophical cases examined by experimental philosophers elicit disagreement.

    2. 2.

      This disagreement takes place among epistemic peers.

    3. 3.

      If most of the philosophical cases examined by experimental philosophers elicit disagreement among peers, then most philosophical cases would plausibly elicit disagreement among peers.

    4. 4.

      If epistemic peers are likely to disagree about a philosophical case, they ought to suspend judgment about it.

    5. 5.

      Hence, except for those philosophical cases known not to elicit disagreement among peers, philosophers ought to suspend judgment about the situations described by philosophical cases (2017:128).

  13. 13.

    Here is his Argument from parochialism:

    1. 1.

      When people respond differently to the philosophical cases examined by experimental philosophers, it is because they refer to different (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties.

    2. 2.

      If people refer to different (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties when they respond differently to the philosophical cases examined by experimental philosophers, they would plausibly do so in response to most philosophical cases.

    3. 3.

      Philosophers are not justified in believing that theorizing about the (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties they refer to will allow them to achieve their philosophical goals.

    4. 4.

      You ought not to decide to φ in order to ψ if you believe you are not justified to believe that φ-ing is likely to bring about ψ.

    5. 5.

      Hence, philosophers ought to focus on determining whether theorizing about the (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties they refer to or about the (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties others refer to will allow them to reach their philosophical goals, stopping for the time being their theorizing about the (epistemic, moral, etc.) properties they refer to.

    6. 6.

      Hence, for the time being, philosophers should not appeal to the method of cases (2017:140).

  14. 14.

    And one more:

    […] philosophical education (…) is supposed to improve far more mundane skills, such as careful attention to details in the description of the scenario and their potential relevance to the questions at issue (Ibid.).

  15. 15.

    For instance, Jackson notes the following:

    Physicists aren’t being chauvinists when they tell us which ways of categorizing systems of particles are important. They are doing their job. Part of our job—the job of philosophers—is to assess which concepts in, for example, epistemology are theoretically important, to delineate the connections between various concepts, and to identify the questions worth asking. 2011.480.

    Here it is worth recalling the history of probabilistic reasoning. Early folk concepts were progressively refined. (…) Polls are relevant to the elucidation of one or another folk concept relating to our uses of terms like ‘expect’ and ‘believe likely’. They are not relevant to the assessment of the edifice of probabilistic reasoning that informs current statistics. This is why the ‘they are wrong’ response is the correct one to those who commit the gambler’s fallacy. We can think of philosophical work in epistemology as aiming to build on some of the same folk materials, with the aim of producing a finished theory (a theory which of course will incorporate probabilistic ways of thinking). Polls won’t be relevant to assessing the final product (Ibid).

  16. 16.

    To quote a recent title of the book by Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Kristen Intemann published in 2018 by Oxford University Press.

  17. 17.

    For more recent development see Sosa (2017).

  18. 18.

    For another kind of pragmatic considerations see Sytsma and Livengood (2011). See also Adams and Steadman (2004) and Driver (2008).

  19. 19.

    The issue of understanding is now being made prominent in several lines of discussions, that go beyond the discussion in experimental philosophy, where theorists often use procedures from the methodology of psychology in order to control variables that might influence subject’s understanding of the question.

    For logical intuitions the famous issue is subjects’ understanding of everyday words for logical constants, most famously “if…then”; is it conditional and biconditional and if the first, what kind of conditional (see chapters Four and Five of Stenning and Lambalgen (2008).

    Concerning arithmetical intuitions there has been a recent intriguing debate about a Brazilian Indian tribe whose members were described as being unable to place objects from even two small bunches in one–one correlation: the researcher took it as a very significant result since the tribe also seems to lack numerals/number words. Others accused him of simply having misunderstood his subjects. See Everett and Madora (2012) For linguistic intuitions a famous, not to say notorious issue is whether illiterate subjects indeed have grammatical intuitions at all see Schütze (1986).

  20. 20.

    See Baz (2012). Baz in his paper also has interesting things to say about the ways semantic/pragmatic distinction is relevant in the Gettier context.

  21. 21.

    An earlier attempt to compare X-phi and theories of bounded rationality is to be found in Buon et al. (2013) “A non-mentalistic cause-based heuristic in human social evaluations”, Cognition 126 149–155.

    I have profited a lot from discussion with one of the authors, Pierre, and I thank him for this!

  22. 22.

    This is, of course, just a beginning. There has been much work done on compatibilism and incompatibilism as represented by folk intuition; we cannot go into it here. See, for instance Nahmias et al. (2005, 2006), and Chan et al. (2016).

  23. 23.

    In short, in light of suggesting that the ideal moral enquirer consider all reasonable arguments, the method of reflective equilibrium fails to Adjudicate the central controversies within moral methodology. Rather, it in effect absorbs all such controversies, as inputs. This undercuts any claim that the method provides an informative answer to pressing methodological questions in ethics. Note that this is true even holding as fixed Rawls’ project of moral theory; how we should proceed if and when we attempt to move from moral theory to actually defending answers to ethical questions is even less clear 2015:661.

  24. 24.

    See also Rédei (2003).

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  1. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Dr. Nenad Miscevic

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Miscevic, N. (2022). The Challenge of Experimental Philosophy. In: Thought Experiments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81082-5_6

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