Experimental Philosophy

NYT on X-Phi and the History of Philosophy

In a recent piece for the New York Times, Justin E. H. Smith discusses the many ways in which various figures throughout the history of philosophy have exhibited a broad curiousity about empirical questions.  He then concludes:

The new “experimental philosophy” movement is... returning to an earlier conception of the inseparability of philosophical reflection and scientific inquiry, though curiously “x-phi” advocates describe themselves as breaking with “traditional” philosophy, rather than as returning to it, which is what in fact they are doing.

In my view, what Smith says here is precisely right.  Experimental philosophy should never have been seen as a break with some conservative idea of 'traditional philosophy.'  Instead, the more accurate view would be that philosophy has been concerned throughout almost all of its history with questions about how ordinary people actually think and feel and that the experimental philosophy movement is simply seeking a return to this grand tradition.

I'd be curious to hear what others think about this issue, though.  Do others see experimental philosophy as a radical break with the past, or do you see it (as I do) more as a retro approach to the discipline?

Experimental Philosophy Updated on Phil Papers

While Experimental Philosophy has always been a part of Phil Papers, it has previously existed only as one leaf under the Philosophical Methods subcategory of Metaphilosophy.  However, we've now expanded the XPHI entry to include several new subcategories!  

These new subcats include various different areas of first-order work, (e.g. Experimental Philosophy: Free Will), as well as a subcategory for second-order issues in philosophical methodology (Foundations of Experimental Philosophy): 

While of course there is still a lot of work to be done updating the site populating these subcategories, the hope is that everyone could help out by tagging their XPHI papers on Phil Papers in the appropriate XPHI subcategory (in addition to any other cross-listed categories in other areas they might already be in). That way, we end up having a great new resource for visualizing and accessing all the work done in particular areas of XPHI.

Also, we'd be happy to hear if anyone has any ideas about possible ways to better divide up the terrain in the future, that would be even more helpful to experimental philosophers.

Experiment Month Drawing to a Close

Just wanted to let everyone know that the official Experiment Month studies--hosted here--will be concluding at the end of this week. We'll be taking down the 17 studies designed by burgeoning experimentalists. Please help these new experimental philosophers out by participating in these studies, or even putting a link on your Facebook page to encourage friends to participate. Given the recent discussion of philosopher and lay-person reactions to experimental philosophical studies on this blog, it would be great if everyone could help encourage others in the profession (and beyond) to participate in these studies, so we can effectively compare responses of different groups. 

Though the Experiment Month Initiative will be drawing to a close, we hope to host new studies by the wider experimental philosophy community on the site in the future. Stay tuned! (There is even a new email list on the site, where you can sign up to receive updates.) 

Experimental Philosophy Lab Meeting at NYU: Alfano and Brownstein (May 20)

Join the Metro Experimental Research Group for an experimental philosophy lab meeting on Friday, May 20th, at 4:00 pm at the NYU Philosophy Department, 2nd floor seminar room. Presentations by Mark Alfano and Michael Brownstein (titles and abstracts appear below) will be followed by informal discussion at a local pub. Please note: unlike other talks this semester, this talk will be held at NYU. 

This will also be my last meeting as director of MERG, before I move to Wisconsin this summer to take an assistant professorship at Lawrence University. So please come wish me farewell, if so inclined. 

Titles and Abstracts: 

"Is Contentment the Dual of Desire? An Experimental Investigation"

Mark Alfano, City University of New York Graduate Center  

Both conceptual analysis and experimental results point toward the conclusion that desire can be formalized as a robust modal operator whose dual is contentment.  I begin by laying out some of the key properties of duals and illustrating them with the alethic modality.  Next, I demonstrate how to formalize the ‘a desires that’ idiom, argue that ‘a would be content with’ is an adequate dual for desire, and map out the desiderative square of opposition thus generated.  I continue by presenting experimental evidence that supports this argument and attempting to defuse some potential methodological objections.  The talk concludes by pointing to some philosophically interesting applications of the logic of desire, including both a formalization of Frankfurtian definitions of free will and a constraint on practical rationality.

"Attributions of Self-Awareness in Action"

Michael Brownstein, New Jersey Institute of Technology

My aim is to identify some factors that influence ordinary attributions of “self-awareness” to others.  In particular, my interest is in explicit self-awareness in action, where one’s attention is focused on what one is doing.  In this study, I sought to uncover subjects’ willingness to attribute several descriptive terms related to self-awareness to people shown in videos typing a letter or playing basketball.  I asked subjects to rate to what extent they thought the person shown in the video “is aware,” “focuses on,” “thinks about,” “deliberates about” and “knows” what he or she is doing.  I aimed to identify six possible influences on attributions of self-awareness. Thus far, there appear to be interesting correlations between a number of these conditions and folk attributions of self-awareness to others.

Experimental Philosophy Metasurvey Results

[I saw a reference to this very interesting work on Billy Dunaway's website a little while ago, and invited him to give us a post about his work with Anna Edmonds and David Manley.  Which is what he's given us below!  So, although the blog will list my name on this post, the rest of this post is Billy's work.  I hope we can get a good discussion going on it! I do recommend clicking through on the link below, too, and you can also find Billy's contact info here, if you want to be in touch with him privately. -Jonathan] 

Some current experimental philosophy is devoted to conducting surveys among non-philosophers to gather information about their dispositions to apply philosophically relevant concepts. And those who report the results of these surveys sometimes make claims about how surprising these results are to philosophers. (Here is a representative quote: "[W]e think that a critical method for figuring out how human beings think is to go out and actually run systematic empirical studies... Again and again, these investigations have challenged familiar assumptions, showing that people do not actually think about these issues in anything like the way philosophers had assumed." (Nichols and Knobe, "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto" in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Knobe and Nichols, p. 3)) But whether an empirical result is surprising to a group of people is itself an empirical question, and so we designed a survey of our own to test this.

Our hypothesis was that that philosophers would, for the most part, correctly guess what kind of response non-philosophers would give. This was confirmed by our study. We selected several published surveys of folk subjects, each of which had been claimed in the literature to have surprising results. The surveys we chose cover a variety of philosophical topics: causation, intentionality, and moral responsibility. We asked philosophers to suppose that ordinary, non-philosophical folk are presented with the relevant cases, and to say how they thought the folk would respond. (Subjects were firmly instructed to opt out of a given question if they had prior familiarity with experimental research that might bias their answer.) For each question, at least 77% (and up to 95.8%) of philosophers correctly predicted how the non-philosophers would respond.

A brief overview of the questions from the experimental philosophy literature we asked about and the results from our study are printed below. For a more detailed presentation of the questions we asked (which include verbaitim descriptions of the vignettes from the original studies conducted by experimental philosophers) and the results, go here.

We closed the survey after 200 philosophers reached the end. Below, we provide the percentages for those who chose to answer the question rather than to indicate that they could not provide an unbiased answer.

The first question was about a study in the 2008 paper "Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment: Two Experiments" by Joshua Knobe and Ben Fraser in Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

There are two studies in the paper; we asked about the study in which subjects are asked how much they agree with the statements 'Professor Smith caused the problem' and 'the administrative assistant caused the problem' (p. 4). 95.8% of 190 respondents predicted the correct result, that agreement with the first statement would be significantly greater than agreement with the second statement.

The second question was about the famous survey about intentional action in Josh Knobe's 2003 Analysis paper "Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language". Of 83 respondents, 83.1% correctly said that subjects would answer 'yes' to the question 'did the chairman intentionally harm the environment?' significantly more often than subjects would answer 'yes' to the question 'did the chairman intentionally help the environment?'

The third and fourth questions came from the 2007 paper by Jonathan Livengood and Edouard Machery, "The Folk Probably Don't Think What You Think They Think: Experiments on Causation by Absence" in Midwest Studies in Philosophy vol. XXXI.

We first asked about the "Broken Rope case" (p. 117): Of 202 responses, 78.2% correctly responded that there would be no significant difference in agreement with the statements 'the rope breaking caused Susan to fall', and 'Susan fell because the rope broke'.

We next asked about the "Unsafe Rope Case" (p. 119): of 198 respondents, 86.4% correctly responded that agreement with 'the rope not breaking caused Susan to reach the rafters' would be significantly lower than agreement with 'Susan reached the rafters because the rope did not break'.

The final two questions came from the study in the 2007 paper "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: the Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions" by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe.

We first asked how subjects would respond, when presented with the abstract question whether people can be morally responsible in a deterministic universe (pp. 669-670); 77.3% of 163 respondents answered that people would answer 'yes' significantly less often than they would answer 'no'.

We then asked how subjects, when presented with a specific description of a brutal crime in a deterministic universe (p. 670), would respond to the question of whether the person who commits the crime is morally responsible. 83.1% of 160 respondents correctly answered that people would answer 'yes' significantly more often than they would answer 'no'.

Tamler Sommers on the Death of the X-Phi Debate

A recent issue of the Philosophers' Magazine included a special section on experimental philosophy. Just as you might expect, there were separate articles on the various different topics that experimental philosophers have investigated (consciousness, intentional action, gender, moral relativism). But then, the editors thought there should also be an article on the very idea of experimental philosophy and the controversy that this idea has engendered. To write this article, they commissioned Tamler Sommers. 

As Sommers explains in the text of his published piece, he had an incredibly difficult time trying to muster up anything interesting to say on the topic. 

I couldn’t do it. I could not get myself to write an essay about the general debate over experimental philosophy. At the time, I had no idea why it was so difficult, but I think I do now. Debates are interesting when there is more than one reasonable position to hold. A debate about whether a particular instance of hate speech should be protected by federal law might be interesting. A debate about the value of freedom of expression laws in general is not. On the question of the general value or viability of experimental philosophy, there is only one reasonable position. This makes it an exceptionally boring debate...

Ultimately, the conclusion Sommers reaches is that the only interesting questions here are about the individual topics that experimental philosophers discuss (consciousness, intentional action, and all the rest). There is just no philosophically interesting issue about whether experimental philosophy itself is a worthwhile field. 

Thoughts?