Experimental Philosophy on Philosophy Talk

Anthony Appiah is the guest on John Perry's and Ken Taylor's great show.  Check it out here.

Comments

[Eddy Nahmias]

At the end of the show, the 60-second philosopher makes fun of our use of the nickname X-Phi (and X-Philes) as a reference to an outdated TV show, when we're supposed to be new and hip (he mentions our anthem and the burning armchair video).

Well, what do people think? I've always avoided it, but then again I argued against using 'Experimental Philosophy' and I was clearly wrong about that.

[jonathan weinberg]

I don't think that "X-Phi" was coined as a reference to Scully and Mulder, but I personally have always enjoyed "X-Philes" as a term for our motley band, and it clearly is such a reference.

However, I was thinking recently about this
http://tinyurl.com/459pb2
and I wondered whether, as a very polemical joke, we could start referring to x-phi instead under the name "evidence-based philosophy".... ;-)

[Peter Henderson]

Experimental philosophy is a useful corrective to some philosophers' tendency to take word-meaning as primitive, which is related to the tendency to see philosophical appropriations of ordinary language terms as freakish and incorrect in principle. This goes back to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in which the author claimed that the terms of ordinary language were perfectly fit tools for representing reality just as they are, in contradictinction to Russell and Frege, who saw their project as laying down the conditions for a 'logically perfect language.' I take Wittgenstein to be saying that an 'illogical' language is inconceivable; it would not qualify as a language. However, the ordinary language philosophers detached his conclusion from the esoteric technical reasons by which Wittgenstein arrived at it. I think the lesson of experimental philosophy is that ordinary speech does not lead a blissful life, undisturbed by philosophical conundrums, but is itself shot through with conflicting conceptual intuitions. The philosopher's rightful claim to expertise is that s/he has fastened onto these and reflected carefully on them. Empirical scientists who tend to slight the conceptual side of their enterprise can learn from philosophers. But it's no solution to a philosophical question to find out which intuitions are held by the most people; still less what part of the brain lights up the most when people think about it. Let's give our brains credit for being more sophisticated than cheap pocket calculators.