Experimental Philosophy

The Linguistic U-Turn

In the early to mid-20th century, anglophone philosophy famously took a "linguistic turn".  Debates about the mind were recast as debates about the terms or concepts we use to describe the mind; debates about free will were recast as debates about the term or concept "freedom"; debates about knowledge were recast as debates about how we do or should use the word "knowledge"; etc.  Wittgenstein famously suggested that most philosophical debates were not substantive but rather confusions that arise "when language goes on holiday" (Philosophical Investigations 38); diagnose the linguistic confusion, dissipate the feeling of a problem.  J.L. Austin endorsed a vision of philosophy as often largely a matter of extracting the wisdom inherent in the subtleties of ordinary language usage.   Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap set philosophers the task of providing logical analyses of ordinary and scientific language and concepts.  By no means, of course, did all philosophers go over to an entirely linguistic view of philosophy (not even Austin, Russell, or Carnap), but the shift was substantial and profound.  In broad-sweeping histories, the linguistic turn is often characterized as the single most important characteristic or contribution of 20th century philosophy.

I view the linguistic turn partly sociologically -- as driven, in part, by philosophy's need to distinguish itself from rising empirical disciplines, especially psychology, as departmental and disciplinary boundaries grew sharper in anglophone universities.  The linguistic turn worked to insulate philosophical discussion from empirical science: Psychologists study the mind, we philosophers study in contrast the concept of the mind.  Physicists study matter, we study in contrast the concept of the material.  "Analytic" philosophers could thus justify their ignorance of and disconnection from empirical work.

This move, however, could only work when psychology was in its youth and dominated by a behaviorist focus on simple behaviors and reinforcement mechanisms (and, even earlier, introspective psychophysics).  As psychology has matured, it has become quite evident -- as indeed it should have been evident all along -- that questions about our words and concepts are themselves also empirical questions and so subject to psychological (and linguistic) study.  This has become especially clear recently, I think, with the rise of experimental philosophers who empirically test, using the methods of psychology, philosophers' and ordinary folks' intuitions about the application of philosophical terms.  (In fact, Austin himself was fairly empirical in his study of ordinary language, reading through dictionaries, informally surveying students and colleagues.)

A priori, armchair philosophy is thus in an awkward position.  The 20th-century justification for analytic philosophy as a distinct a priori discipline appears to be collapsing.  I don't think a prioristic philosophers will want to hold on much longer to the view that philosophy is really about linguistic and conceptual analysis.  It's clear that psychology and linguistics will soon be able to (perhaps already can) analyze our philosophical concepts and language better than armchair philosophers.  Philosophers who want to reserve a space for substantive a priori knowledge through "philosophical intuition", then, have a tough metaphilosophical task cut out for them. George Bealer, Laurence BonJour, and others have been working at it, but I can't say that I myself find their results so far very satisfying.

[Note: Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Evidence that Stakes Don't Matter to Evidence

Given Wesley’s recent post on contextualism about knowledge, I thought it might be worthwhile to post a paper Ram Neta and I recently wrote on anti-intellectualism (in particular, interest-relative invariantism) about evidence.  This thesis has recently been put forward by Jason Stanley, when, for example, he writes in the “Précis of Knowledge and Practical Interests” (PPR, 2007) that:

The quality of evidence for a person X at a time t provided by some information, or some method of gaining information, depends upon whether it is used to support X’s belief in a proposition that is a serious practical question for X at t.

Since support for anti-intellectualism, like contextualism, seems to rest on intuitive responses to cases, we attempted to experimentally assess whether our intuitive judgments about cases actually support the hypothesis that there is a relation between one’s evidence and the practical costs of being wrong.  We collected folk judgments to a variety of high and low stakes vignettes.  We also manipulated the study design so that each subject was given either a high stakes case, or a low stakes case, or both.  We found that some subjects (about half) responded as anti-intellectualists to the juxtaposed cases.  This made for a significant difference between means in the way the anti-intellectualist would predict when high and low stakes are juxtaposed, as they typically are in philosophical papers.  However, means were not significantly different for subjects’ answers to the non-juxtaposed cases.  (Indeed, in one of our studies means were in the opposite direction as anti-intellectualists would predict.)  These results (and others to a distinct experiment discussed in the paper) lead us to put forward a two part hypothesis:   (1) Importance does not usually factor into people’s assessments of an agent’s evidence in particular cases.  But (2) some people at least tacitly accept the general claim that importance does factor into what evidence someone has; and, when asked about juxtaposed important and unimportant pieces of information, these people tend to adjust for importance when making evidential assessments, in light of their acceptance of this general claim.  Comments are appreciated.   

Here is the paper: Download evidence_that_stakes_dont_matter_to_evidence_v3.doc

Prinz on Bloggingheads.tv

Our own Jesse Prinz can be seen on Bloggingheads.tv talking about emotions and morality here.  It's worth pointing out that Jesse is the third experimental philosopher to appear on BH.tv in the past couple of months.  Both Joshua Knobe  (see here, here, and here) and Shaun Nichols (see here)  have recently appeared as well.  Viva la revolucion!

Knowledge on Saturday

As I sort-of mentioned in an earlier post, I have been running some experiments up at SUNY in epistemology, and working on a draft summarizing some preliminary results specifically related to the epistemic contextualist debate.  I hope this is not too old-hat, but even so it might still be of interest to readers of the blog working in similar areas.  Of course, (gentle) comments would be very helpful.

Abstract: While many philosophers have traditionally thought that knowledge is invariable, epistemic contextualists challenge this position by claiming that the truth conditions of knowledge assertions and denials are relative to particular linguistic situations.  Contextualists often garner support for this view by appealing to folk intuitions regarding the knowledge practices of normal agents in everyday speech.  However, such ordinary-language defenses often mask a series of unsupported empirical hypotheses.  Proposed is a set of experiments designed to test for the descriptive conditions upon which these types of contextualist defenses rely.  These experiments indicate that, for certain central cases in the literature, the contextualist pattern of knowledge attribution does not maintain among ordinary speakers.  These results, while preliminary, inspire prima facie skepticism for the contextualist hypothesis regarding knowledge claims.  It is further argued that these findings also raise methodological questions concerning the contextualist practice of parlaying intuitions, with respect to ordinary language practices, into philosophical conclusions regarding knowledge.

Download buckwalter_knowing_on_saturday_final.pdf

Wesley

Experimental Work on Machery et al.'s "Semantics, Cross-cultural Style"

Jonathan Livengood (Pitt, HPS) and I have been investigating Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich’s (2004) findings of cross-cultural and intra-cultural variation in intuitions about Kripke’s Gödel case. The paper ("The Case of the Divergent Descriptions: An Experimental Investigation of Semantics, Cross-cultural Style") can be found here and is briefly summarized below.

Abstract: In two fascinating articles, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich (2004; forthcoming) use experimental methods to raise a specter of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian subjects about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke’s Gödel example). They found significant variation in subjects’ intuitions about that case. While there have been a number of theoretical responses to this work, there have not yet been any experimental responses. This paper fills that gap. We noticed an ambiguity in the question Machery et al. posed in their original experiment; we then ran three studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on subjects’ responses. We found that the ambiguity accounts for much of the variation found in their original experiment. We argue that in the light of our data, Machery et al.’s argument is no longer convincing.

To quickly summarize our main findings: Across three studies we found that if Machery et al.’s original test question is slightly modified to emphasize the speaker’s perspective (John’s perspective), the percentage of (B) answers goes down; on the other hand, if you slightly modify the question to emphasize the narrator’s perspective, the percentage of (B) answers goes up. That percentage goes up even more with further clarifications of the question to better emphasize the narrator’s perspective. The results are shown graphically below (the studies on the left were between subjects, the study on the right within subjects).

 

As always, comments are both welcome and appreciated!

[Cross-posted at My Mind is Made Up.]

Thanks for Your Patience...

I just wanted to briefly follow up on a promissory note that I issued in one of the comment threads last week.  At the time, I stated that I would post something soon about some of the criticisms that were put forward at the recent SPP workshop.  I still plan to do so.  For now, both Brian Scholl and Ron Mallon have kindly agreed to share their presentations with the readers of the blog.  Once I have the presentations from each of them, I will post them along with links to some of the papers by Sosa that contain critical commentary on the methods we use and the conclusions we try to draw.  Michael Devitt also provided some critical remarks at the very end of the workshop that I will briefly (and likely incompetently!) summarize for the purposes of discussion.  In the meantime, hold fast!  I haven't forgotten the importance of collectively thinking more carefully about some of the issues that arose.  Hopefully, once everyone has had the opportunity to read through the salient material/remarks, we can have a productive discussion concerning the upsides and downsides of experimental philosophy!  For now, have fun participating in Eddy's thread on intuitions!

What are Intuitions?

I am doing a directed reading this summer on experimental philosophy (co-taught with my colleague Andrea Scarantino) and yesterday we spent a long time debating what intuitions are, since this is clearly an important question for [experimental] philosophers.  I'll post some of the ideas we discussed, and what we have found in the literature later (we'll be discussing it more in another session).  But first I wanted to ask people three sets of questions:

1. How do you conceive of intuitions?  And, if you wish to add more:  given your conception of intuitions, how do you think they relate to theories (implicit vs. explicit) and concepts?  Do you define these things in terms of their content or the process that generates them or both?  Is there a difference between philosophical intuitions and other intuitions?  Between philosophers' intuitions and folk intuitions? What do you take the evidential status of intuitions to be? etc. (Yeah, I know this is too much, but at a minimum, we're trying to find a concise, useful definition of the sorts of intuitions philosophers talk about.)

2. What are the best pieces to read to gain information about the above questions? 
The main pieces I know of are:
A nice new Goldman piece in Grazer Philosophische 2007 "Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status"
The essays in DePaul and Ramsey's Rethinking Intuitions (I've found most of these essays very useful)
Hinikka's "The Emperor's New Intuitions" (JPhil 1999)
Some other pieces by Bealer, Sosa, Weinberg, Kornblith that I don't feel like looking up right now, and Jackson's From Metaphysics to Ethics has some relevant stuff.  I have not read Joel Pust's book Intuitions as Evidence, so someone tell us if it is essential reading.
And please tell us what else is out there.

3. Has anyone taught a course on experimental philosophy yet?  If so, it'd be nice if people could share what they've taught.  I know Stich has taught such a course and his syllabus is online, but I think others have as well.  I suspect the pieces in the new Knobe and Nichols volume would be a good start, but what else?  And, related to the previous question, what sorts of background pieces would work best? 

first experimental philosophy job listing?

I just stumbled upon this job listing at CalTech for the upcoming year, and was very pleased to see that they were looking for "Any area of philosophy informed by the empirical or mathematical sciences (e.g., philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, empirical ethics, political philosophy, experimental philosophy). "  Is this the first job ad to officially & explicitly list experimental philosophy as a possible part of the AOS?

New web page at Bristol Philosophy Dept

There is now a new web page devoted to Experimental Philosophy at the Bristol University Philosophy Department website, at http://www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/projects/exp_phil.  I'll be adding links to other x-phi websites and to questionnaires, including one I'm working on myself at the moment, so let me know if you'd like me to include anything?  Thanks.

More New Contributors!

It has been busy here as of late!  Needless to say, I am delighted so many people have been visiting the blog and participating in the threads.  Three more contributors have recently come on board, so I thought it would only be appropriate to welcome them to the community:

Adam Arico
Anne Jacobson
Jason Shepard (undergraduate at the University of South Alabama--the host of this conference)

*I wasn't always good about formerly welcoming new contributors in the past, so here's a shout out to all the old school crew of contributors who I neglected!  Their names are lurking in the ever growing (70!) list of contributors.  As always, if you know of anyone who should be on the list or who might be interested, just tell them to drop me a line.