X-Phi Revisited

I originally planned to post this along with the bibliography, but I forgot.  But then Edouard's post about Wegner reminded me of why I wanted to say something about this in the first place.  In the two papers that Eddy and I have been working on we try to give a loose account of why x-phi is both experimental and philosophical.  We suggest that it is (a) experimental to the extent that the researcher actually conducts her own studies rather than relying on the data of other researchers, and (b) philosophical to the extent that experimental philosophers spend time explaining the philosophical salience and implications of the data they collect. 

By fleshing out x-phi in this way, we can distinguish what we do from what more traditional empirically minded/naturalistic philosophers do and from what experimental psychologists do.  Unfortunately, a few problems immediately arise.  The one I want to discuss now is the question of whether on this definition of x-phi, lots of psychologists who do not self-identify with (or even know about) the movement should nevertheless be counted as experimental philosophers.  Must one be both an experimentalist and a philosopher to count?  If so, what qualifies one as being a philosopher?  This is not just a nit-picky semantic quibble--just think of what assumptions have to be made in order to settle on which papers/books should be included in a bibliography on experimental philosophy.

Now in the event that the psychologists themselves self-identify with the experimental philosophy movement--e.g., Cushman, Greene, Pizzarro--it is clear enough that their work counts (even if they identify first and foremost with psychology).  But what about other similarly philosophically minded psychologists who both run studies and discuss their philosophical importance--e.g., Haidt, Wegner, Damasio, Gazzaniga, Nisbett, Libet, Cohen, Darley, and the list goes on--but who do not view themselves as working in experimental philosophy? 

In some technical sense, when Wegner starts relying on his empirical research to argue for a position within the free will debate, doesn't he--at some point--stop doing psychology and start doing philosophy?  If so, is it correct to say that some of his research is technically experimental philosophy even if he has never even heard of the x-phi movement?  How would we need to define experimental philosophy in order to avoid this definitional problem?   

I also had a related question that arose while I was working on the bibliography.  Even once we settle on which researchers count as doing experimental philosophy, how do we distinguish their experimental philosophical work from their non-experimental work.  Take, for instance, Doris and Stich.  Their respective research is always sensitive to the scientific data--but they do not always rely on their own empirical studies.  As a result, even though all of their stuff is empirically informed, not all of it is experimental.  So, here again, how do we decide which books and articles from Doris or Stich belong on the experimental philosophy bibliography and which ones do not?  One answer is that we count the research that involves their own studies as experimental and the rest as empirically informed--but this seems unecessarily restrictive.

In any event, since the x-phi set spend more time puzzling about the very foundations of their movement than any other group of philosophers I know, I thought now might be a good time to raise that age-old question once again:  What, exactly, is it that we're doing when we do experimental philosophy?

Comments

[Joachim Horvath]

Please forgive me the tang of irony, but doesn't this cry out for a self-application of experimental philosophy to the question of how to define experimental philosophy?

[tnadelhoffer]

Joachim,

The overwhelming evidence (i.e., my own intuitions) suggests that either "experimental philosophy" is a family resemblance term (perhaps best cashed out in terms of exemplar or proto-type articles/books) or it can be captured in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions but only if we violate our own intuitions with respect to what and who we are qua experimental philosophers!

If we poll the experimental philosophers themselves, would we be doing meta-experimental philosophy? Hmmmm... :)

[Chris]

I think many psychologists, especially cognitive and social, think and often write about what they see as the philosophical implications of their work. You'd be hard pressed to find a book on any topic in higher order cognition that doesn't address philosophical issues. I think many of us would even call ourselves "experimental philosophers," with or without the recent movement in analytic philosophy.

[tnadelhoffer]

Chris, I agree. When psychologists try to flesh out what follows if their predictions and theories are true--philosophically speaking--then they are doing experimental philosophy no less than the philosophers who run their own studies and then try to flesh out the same kind of details. Of course, psychologists are typically better at the experimental part than they are the philosophical, and the converse is true for the philosopher doing experimental work. They all nevertheless often seem to be up to roughly the same thing. Compare, for instance, the work being done by Joshua Greene, Jonathan Haidt, and Shaun Nichols on moral intuitions (or compare Nisbett and Stich with Trout & Bishop on epistemic intuitions). The boundary between philosophy and science is often hopelessly blurry these days.

But if we conceive experimental philosophy this broadly, then the bibliography I have been putting together is going to explode! Which is fine by me, but I will definitely need some help. Luckily, someone has made just such an offer. Once the list is up and running, adding to it will be a snap for everyone. I would be particularly grateful if you would take the time to add some of the psychologists whose work you think can aptly be called philosophical.

[tnadelhoffer]

Chris,
One more thing. I would love to have more psychologists as contributors here--so in the event that you know some who may be interested, steer them my way. The more the merrier! Thanks in advance!

[jonathan weinberg]

I do hope that this list won't grow uncontrollably, though. Much of the value of such a bibliography would be as a guide for someone looking to find out about the field, and wanting to know what they need to prioritize reading. Getting _too_ inclusive here might result in a document that will not serve well as such a guide.

One thing that is worth distinguishing, I think, is between scientific work that is meant to speak to issues about the mind and cognition, and that which is aimed at matters that go beyond the psychological. (Where philosophical questions about moral judgment and free will are meant to be "beyond the psychological".) I take it that we're looking to help make sense of the latter kind of work, which is a relatively new movement in philosophy; whereas the appeal to empirical results in the service of good theoretical understanding of the mind is comparatively well-established.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Interesting thoughts. It seems to me that the "X-phi" crowd tends to emphasize not just any experimental work by philosophers but experimental work by philosophers on our intuitions about philosophical cases. More narrowly defined in that way, it is a coherent movement. If you broaden the definition, and you start including old research by Stich and Fodor and Suppes and the like, I'm not sure how coherent the list is going to be; and much of it will be very close to simply mainstream psychology. (I think I'm more or less agreeing with Jonathan Weinberg here.)

[tnadelhoffer]

Jonathan and Eric,
I share the same worry. However, I did want to have some way of including background readings that someone new to experimental philosophy would need to read--even if much of it is non-experimental. My latest stab at organizing the bibliography may have allayed your worries. The first section is limited to experimental work by people who either self-identify (or would if asked) with experimental philosophy. The second section contains non-experimental stuff by philosophers and psychologists a like.

I nevertheless have a question. You say that if we broaden the definition too much, a lot of mainstream psychology will count. But I am unsure that this is correct. I would venture to guess that most mainstream psychology is not very philosophical in its thrust. There, are, however, a number of well-known psychologists who try their hand at philosophy. Why isn't their stuff both experimental and philosophical? Moreover, why shouldn't we try to convince them that they are actually doing x-phi when they leave the lab behind and start worrying about their data's broader philosophical implications? I think Chris is correct that many psychologists would, if pressed, agree that sometimes they are doing philosophy rather than merely psychology. Why not, then, try to increase the size of the x-phi movement by bringing more psychologists on board? It is what I envisioned from the start for this blog, it has just taken longer than I would have liked to find psychologists who are willing to play along.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

You've probably seen Knobe's Experimental Philosophy page:
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html

Here are two features of it that are interesting and pertinent to this discussion:

First, Knobe defines experimental philosophy as putting "claims about intuitions to the test, using experimental methods" -- a much narrower definition than yours, and one that picks out a relatively new and coherent movement.

Second, he has a long list of "Philosophers Who Have Done Experimental Work" which has only limited overlap with your bibliography.

Maybe your bibliography should have three sections: One for experimental work on philosophical claims about intuitions (X-Phi in the narrow sense). A second for methodological discussions of that sort of thing. And a third for experimental work by philosophers and philosophical work by psychologists (X-Phi in the broad sense).

[tnadelhoffer]

Eric,

But even if we limit experimental philosophy to the experimental work done on intuitions and the claims we make about intuitions--and I am sympatehtic with the reasons you and Jonathan offered for doing so--it is still unclear whether psychologists are doing x-phi when they investigate folk intuitions and talk about the broader implications of these intuitions.

Compare,for instance, some of the work by Haidt the psychologist with the work by Nichols the philosopher. What's the substantive difference? They are both interested in approaching moral psychology in an empirically informed way. They both rely on data about folk intuitions to motivate both their own views and to criticize the views of others. They are both sensitive to the philosophical issues just as much as they are the experimental. And the list of similarities goes on. Of course, there are some obvious differences. One is a professor of psychology, the other is a professor of philosophy. One self-identifies with the x-phi movement, the other does not (at least not to me knowledge). But do these differences merit the conclusion that Nichols sometimes does experimental philosophy whereas Haidt does not?

Keep in mind, I realize that on several levels, this language game is silly. Nothing important ultimately hangs on precisely how we define experimental philosophy. It would nevertheless be helpful for the purposes of drafting a bibliography if one had a means for settling whose work makes it on the list. I, for one, can't imagine not having someone who is new to x-phi read Darley, Haidt, Hauser, Greene, Malle, Mikhail, Nisbett, etc. But once you broaden the definition of x-phi to include the work on intuitions done by these psychologists, x-phi seems to strain at the seams!

Perhaps your suggestion concerning a tri-partite division solves the problem. I just want to make sure that self-identification does not play a part in the definition of experimental philosophy. If it did, it would mean that whether or not a particular paper is an instance of x-phi would depend in part on whether the authors views it as such. Since I find this intolerably counter-intuitive, I would like to find a way of definining x-phi that did not depend upon self-identification. Even if we insist on the following three conditions: (a) must be experimental, (b) must focus on intuitions, and (c) must consider the philosophical upshot of the experimental data on intuitions, it is still unclear whether some psychologists can properly be said to be doing experimental philosophy in addition to psychology.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Well, it's going to be a fuzzy thing! (Isn't everything, really?)

Here's a reasonable test, I think, for the inclusion/exclusion of psychologists' work: Are they citing and substantially discussing some philosophical literature they take to be illuminated by their experimental work (on intuitions [in X-Phi narrow sense] or on anything [in X-Phi broad sense])?

That's still going to be a very long list of psychology works, for X-Phi in the broad sense, but only a very small percentage of actual published psychology.

[jonathan weinberg]

Actually, I don't like the move that builds the concern with intuitions into the gloss on what x-phi is. This strikes me as a contingent feature of the movement.

It seems to me that there are at least two different, even if heavily inter-linked, clusters of empirically-informed work in play here. One is basically a chunk of the philosophy of psychology/cognitive science, and is concerned with empirical stuff because, well, it's pretty unimaginable to do armchair philosophy of the sciences these days. The problems you're looking at are those that get raised in the science itself, and the work you're doing is meant at least in part to be handmaidenly to that science, or at least to accurately reflect what's going on it. This cluster of work has been going on for decades.

The other, more recent cluster is not so much a chapter of philosophy of psychology as it is a diverse set of chapters in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and the like, including metaphilosophy/philosophical methodology. It is this latter cluster to which, it seems to me, the phrase "experimental philosophy" has come to refer. Using that phrase (or "x-phi") to refer primarily to that should in no way mean to connote anything unexperimentalish about that the other cluster. But that other cluster doesn't need a name, as it already has one: "philosophy of psychology/cognitive science".

I should note, given Eric's citing of it, that Joshua' list of philosophers who have done experimental work runs across both clusters. And that's fine -- it's useful to see just how, in some sense, fully precedented it is for philosophers to be doing experimental stuff. But I don't think it's meant to be taken as anything like a definitive guide to "experimental philosophy".

So here is my proposal for a procedure for determining the contents of this bibliography should be:
(1) Identify the works that are squarely in that cluster, and put them on the list;

(2) Identify what works one really needs to have read in order to understand the works on the list. This will include, at a minimum, (a) philosophical background (e.g., canonical work on free will, or in Gettierology); (b) psychological background; and (c) work that looks to interrogate the works on the list (e.g., Sosa's and Kaupinnen's papers).

(3) Repeat (2) as needed. (So we're getting in the end is the closure of the clear candidates for x-phi status under need-to-read-to-understand relation.)

Note that nothing in here makes a distinction between work by philosophers and work by psychologists. I think we should just agree that, e.g., Hauser's recent work belongs in (1), and not worry about whether it's 'really' philosophy or not. Haidt, Nisbett, and the like will all get onto the list at the first application of step (2), and that's fine.

[tnadelhoffer]

Jonathan,

As is often the case, I find myself agreeding with you! Once I have finished tinkering with the bibliography, I will repost it. For now, I just wanted you to know that "Gettierology" almost made me fall out of the chair. It reminds me of Mele's paper on what he calls "Reasonology"--very funny stuff!

[jonathan weinberg]

I only wish I had coined it! It's a common enough term around analytic epistemology parts.

I just realized I squished together two distinct criteria in my step (2) that really are different: the 'stuff you need to read in order to read x-phi', which is as I glossed above; and 'stuff that talks about x-phi', which is how Sosa, Kapuinnen, etc. get in there. Perhaps the distinction could be simply glosses as 'stuff that x-phi presupposes you've read' and 'stuff that presupposes you've read x-phi'.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

To come up with a category 'stuff that x-phi presupposes you read', I think you have to have a narrow view of x-phi in mind, don't you? Otherwise, won't pretty much all of philosophy will get in? -- since, I assume you'll agree, there's a broad range of philosophical questions that can have empirical light cast upon them, and a broad variety of methods for shining such light.

I worry that self-described x-phi-ers often have only narrow sense of x-phi in mind when they put together bibliographies, organize sessions, and the like, despite the broad umbrella explicitly adopted in some statements of the program.

I'm inclined to think the x-phi movement has a choice between tight coherence and a narrow definition, or inclusivity with some loss of coherence -- and a broader range and longer history of contributors than is sometimes portrayed.

Either choice is cool, and I feel supportive of the movement either way; but I do think it's a choice x-phi-ers must face if they're going to be reflective about the nature of the movement. (And it's a choice that affects whether I see myself as a sympathetic observer of the x-phi movement or an active participant in it.)

[tnadelhoffer]

Eric,

When I first tried to figure out for myself the relationship between empirically informed philosophy and its experimental off-shoot, I envisioned the later as being part of the former. On this view, experimental philosophy is empirically informed philosophy with two twists: First,the research involves the running of controlled and systemtatic experiments. Second, the experiments are designed to give the researcher access to participants' intuitions. Experimental philosophers then go on to discuss why the data on intutions they have collected are relevant to philosophy.

So the three conditions of x-phi on this model are: (a) must be experimental, (b) must focus on intuitions, and (c) must consider the philosophical upshot of the experimental data on intuitions.

Of course, as you correctly point out, conceiving of x-phi in this narrow way limits how many people get to be part of the happy family. As such, I would prefer coming up with a more inclusive conception. However, the difficulties that arise in this context are what led to the recent series of posts in the first place.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Right! Thanks for the interesting post and thoughtful dialogue!

[Nicolae Rusan]

I feel as though there is no profession that is devoid of philosophy.

In physics especially, I have found that most who study the topic are very philosophically inclined. The physicists i know are inclined to make philosophical evaluations of all the conclusions they attain via their work. In fact, I greatly enjoy some of the philosophical works published by some of the eminent physicians of the 20th century.

Now, there seem to be a great deal of books, for example, dealing with the "God Particle", particle physics, and what the new evidence seems to imply not only scientifically, but also philosophically.

I am new to the world of philosophy blogs, but I have actually started my own blog on the philosophy of technology, innovation and the future - and I would love to get some feedback regarding what you all think about my ideas. Please check it out at http://foresighter.blogspot.com/

Nicolae Rusan

[Chris]

Just coming back to this conversation, and thinking about what Thomas has said, I wonder whether the large body of research on folk mechanics, folk biology, folk psychology (or theory of mind), and what is often generally referred to as folk ontology, would count as experimental philosophy? These research areas are interested in people's intuitions and representations about aspects of reality that, I imagine, are rather important in philosophy (like other minds, say). I know Joshua's research and writing falls into the folk psychology category, and he's written a bunch about it, but these other areas might be important as well, and there's a huge literature on each.

[Michael Woods]

Hi, I am just now completing a psychology degree, and have always read critical literature and philosophy and so forth. I feel that psychology, at its very heart, IS by definition, experimental philosophy. Especially once you take a step back and look at psychology's aims to achieve prior to the advent of reductionist behaviourism.
Anyway, what do you think? This is an important topic for me, as I am going to be embarking on a research career next year, and this is very close to my heart. Any general introductory readings anyone can recommend prior to the release of the biblio would also be great.