The Psychology of Philosophy

"Experimental philosophy", as a movement within philosophy, has so far been almost entirely focused on testing people's intuitions and judgments about philosophical puzzle cases.  In this post on the Underblog of The Splintered Mind, I argue for a broader vision of experimental philosophy, including the possibility of experiments on:

• introspective claims about the structure of concious experience (e.g., beeper studies to test claims about ordinary lived experience)
• the causes (including the psychological and cultural factors) influencing philosophers' preferences for particular sorts of philosophical theories (e.g., studies of the psychological correlates of a preference for Kantianism over consequentialism in ethics)
• the real-life consequences of adopting or teaching particular philosophical theories (e.g., does teaching students utilitarianism, or Nietzsche, have any positive (or negative) effects on their behavior?)

I'll be presenting these ideas orally at the Experimental Phiilosophy Workshop pre-conference at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Philadelphia next week.  (The program shows my presentation title as "Introspection and Experiment", but I've broadened my topic and thus changed the title.)

Comments welcome!

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Comments

[wes anderson]

I'll have to have a look at the "Underblog." From these comments, however, all I can say is, I'm with you.

[B Plant]

Absolutely. Isn't it amazing that it took philosophers so long to consider actually doing this sort of work? James, Wittgenstein, Joad, Nietzsche (amongst others, no doubt) all suggested this way back. There has been some work on the psychology of philosophy (cf. Steven J. Bartlett). Does anyone know of other sources?

[Blake Myers]

A fair amount of Paul Bloom’s work is relevant to this topic. Bloom uses evidence from developmental psychology to argue that humans have a natural bias against materialism. Links to some of his published articles can be found here: http://www.yale.edu/langcoglab/publications.htm
Two articles that are particularly relevant are: "Do 5-month-old infants see humans as material objects?" and "Childhood origins of adult resistance to science." Also, there’s a general overview on “natural born dualism” by Bloom here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html

[Wes Anderson]

Dr. Schwitzgebel,
Is there (or will there be) a paper posted/published on this, or just the oral talk?