Experimental Philosophy

On the Overselling of Experimental Philosophy

Responding to the Prospect article that we recently linked to, "Philosophy's great experiment",  Dwight Furrow has some thoughts up under the heading "Overselling Experimental Philosophy" -- and, to be clear, it is the the article that he is accusing of the overselling, not experimental philosophers themselves.  I do think that this is something of a concern; so much of the coverage that experimental philosophy has received really has been rather unfortunately hyped up, in a way that is understandable given the way that part of media's being media is that it hypes things up.  But this has led to some unhappy consequences (I'm sure many readers remember this fooferaw a couple of years back), and maybe goes some way towards explaining some of the strange attitudes that some philosophers have taken up in response to the body of work produced under the x-phi label. 

And I find myself in agreement with a very large part of what Furrow says in his post, and I suspect that most of the x-phi community would agree with much of it as well.  For example:

"X-phi is interesting because it might help philosophers do one part of their job. But it cannot solve philosophical problems."  (I think that latter sentence is supposed to be read as meaning something like "X-phi cannot solve philosophical problems by itself.")

"The real problem with some contemporary philosophy is not the absence of scientific data but the use of odd and fanciful scenarios like the Trolley Problem to unearth how we reason."

"Experimental philosophy may help us determine what people believe and how they respond to various situations. Thus, it can act as a check against unreflectively assuming our intuitions are shared."

Nonetheless, despite these agreements, there are also some parts of his post that I think don't quite hit the mark.  Furrow's post continues after that last quoted sentence as follows: "But brain scans can’t tell us much about why people think as they do, and tracking blood flow or electrical activity is not going to reveal very much about patterns of reasoning."  But brain scans can, in fact, tell us very important things about why people think as they do!  I take it that what's interesting about, e.g., Josh Greene's work in this regard is very much that it is providing some evidence for claims about what psychological factors are or are not in play when people make different sorts of moral judgments.

He continues: "Furthermore, questionnaires and observations of behavior are notoriously unreliable in explaining the motives behind our actions, and are hardly revolutionary."  Well... is any part of philosophy really concerned with "explaining the motives behind our actions"?  Have any experimental philosophers taken on such a question? And I don't see how armchair reflection is going to do a better job of offering such explanations.  This may be a pitch for doing more and better x-phi -- or just plain more and better psychology -- but I don't see how it is much of a critique of the movement as such.  (I'm also not sure what the point is about whether or not using surveys are "revolutionary".  Seems to me it's clearly not at all revolutionary in psychology, which is a large part of why we're willing to use it ourselves; but it clearly does represent a nontrivial methodological shift in contemporary philosophy.  What else is supposed to be at stake here?)

But, anyhow, that's just quibbling.  I think the deeper disagreement is here, and I think it also points to a deeper promise on the part of x-phi for the philosophical project on the whole:

"Most importantly, X-phi could not begin to tell us how we ought to think about reality. It is rooted in what is, not what should be. It can be critical of philosopher’s pretensions but not of the beliefs it purports to describe. It will not be making philosophical discoveries."

Surely Furrow would be right if all he meant is that we will make few direct discoveries by doing x-phi -- for no one thinks that we're going to just learn whether compatibilism is true, or what normative moral theory is correct, or whether knowledge really is stakes-sensitive, just by looking at people's survey responses and brain scans.  But that middle sentence of this last quote seems to aim for something stronger, and something that seems to me to indicate where things have gone off the rails here.  Barring some particularly pure form of rationalism, most all of our thinking about "what should be" is itself thoroughly and ineliminably rooted in our thinking about "what is".  Change your picture of what's going on descriptively in our minds and in our lives, and you will often change your picture of how our minds and lives should be directed.  Just consider, for example, how many issues in the philosophy of mind have been transformed by shifts in the relevant  sciences -- including, very much, our inquiries into the nature of rationality itself.  Or, to pull an example from another literature I'm interested in, consider how enriched recent discussions in aesthetics has been by its engagement with descriptive psychology of the emotions (e.g., in Jenefer Robinson's Deeper than Reason).  For exactly these reasons, I think we can expect that, pace Furrow, x-phi will indeed play a significant role in future philosophical discoveries.

End of (Philosophical) Innocence

Philosophy is built upon intuitions. (Maybe all knowledge is, at root.) Arguments must start somewhere, with something that seems obvious, with something we're willing to take for granted. In the 20th century, philosophers became methodologically explicit about this. Ethicists explicitly appeal to the intuition that it's not right to secretly kill and dissect one healthy person in order to save five needing organ transplants. Metaphysicians appeal to the intuition that if your molecules were scanned and taken apart and that information used to create a person elsewhere who was molecule-for-molecule identical to you, that person would be you. Philosophical debate often consists of noting the apparent clash between one set of intuitions and a theory grounded in a different set of intuitions. For example, if you won't dissect the one to save the five, does that imply that if a runaway trolley is heading toward five immobilized people, you shouldn't divert it to a side-track containing only one? There are ways to say no to the one and yes to the other, of course, but only by means of principles that conflict with still other intuitions... and we're off into the sort of save-the-intuitions game that analytic philosophers (and I too) enjoy!

Until recently, such intuition-saving disputes have been conducted without any careful empirical reflection on the source and trustworthiness of those intuitions. We have the sense that it would be wrong to dissect the one or that the recreated individual would be you, but where does that intuition come from? Do such intuitions somehow track a set of facts, independent of the individual philosopher's mind, about what is really right, or about what personal identity really consists in? A story needs to be told.

That story will necessarily be an empirical story, a story about the psychology of intuition -- and maybe, too, the sociology and anthropology and history and linguistics of intuition. For example, suppose it turns out that only highly educated English speakers share some particular intuition that is widely cited in analytic philosophy. That should cast some doubt -- doubt that can perhaps be overcome with a further story -- about the merit of that intuition. Or suppose that a certain intuition was to be found only among people for whom having that intuition would excuse them from serious moral culpability for actions performed earlier in their lives. That should should cast defeasible doubt on the intuition.

With the maturing of empirical sciences that can cast light on the sources of our intuitions, we philosophers can no longer justifiably ignore such genetic considerations in evaluating our arguments. We can no longer innocently take our intuitions about philosophical cases as simply given. We must recognize that psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics can cast important light on the merits and especially demerits of particular philosophical arguments.

Of course most philosophers know virtually nothing about psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, and linguistics; and most psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and linguists are insufficiently enmeshed in philosophical debates to bring their resources to bear. A huge cross-disciplinary terrain remains almost unspoiled. To me, nothing could be more exciting! (Well, nothing in academia.)

A few have made starts: Paul Bloom, Tony Jack, and Philip Robbins have been discussing the roots of the intuition that mind and body are distinct. Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser, Joshua Greene, and John Mikhail have been discussing the psychological roots of the moral intuitions in runaway trolley type cases. Reading "intuition" widely to include any views that people find attractive without compelling argument, Shaun Nichols has explored the roots of the intuition that there is no incompatibility between free will and causal determinism. I have examined the culturally-local metaphors behind the sense philosophical phenomenologists and others have that coins look elliptical when seen from an angle. Other experimental philosophers are on the cutting edge here, too.  However, these are barely beginnings.

[Cross posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Only the Facts, Please...

At the recent pre-SPP experimental philosophy workshop, one criticism of the work we do was hit upon by both Michael Devitt and Daniel Weiskopf. The charge is that at least one research program within experimental philosophy—which Eddy Nahmias and I have called Experimental Analysis (EA)—is based upon a questionable assumption concerning the proper targets of philosophical investigation. According to this line of reasoning—which I am going to call the Facts not Concepts Objection (FNCO)—the interest in conceptual analysis of folk concepts that loomed large during the post-positivist days in Anglophone philosophy was misguided from the start. The main suggestion being made by proponents of FNCO is that philosophers ought to be trying to determine what minds, knowledge, free will, and the like really are rather than cataloging and sketching the boundaries of the respective folk concepts. As such, philosophers—to the extent that they are doing anything distinct from their counterparts in the scientific community—are in the business of analyzing technical philosophical concepts that are supposed to carve nature at the joints via necessary and jointly sufficient conditions rather than tinkering with the often vague boundaries of humdrum ordinary concepts. On this view, the interesting issue is what free will really is and not how the philosophically impoverished person on the street happens to apply the term “free will” to particular cases. Since this is a common response to experimental philosophy more generally, I thought it would be helpful to sketch a brief response to this line of attack for the purposes of discussion. After all, if folk concepts are indeed irrelevant to philosophy, then the project of EA would admittedly be quite philosophically pointless at the end of the day. Whether the other projects within experimental philosophy might still be worthwhile even if EA is not is a story for another day. For now, I am solely going to focus on the criticisms of EA.

 

Appiah Reading Group on Ethics-Etc.

The Appiah Reading Group on Ethics-Etc. has begun.   

The schedule is as follows:

3 March Neil Levy (Melbourne and Oxford):  1. Introduction: The Waterless Moat
17 March Steve Clarke (CAPPE and Oxford):  2. The Case against Character
31 March S. Matthew Liao (Oxford):  3. The Case against Intuition
7 April Thom Brooks (Newcastle):  4. The Varieties of Moral Experience
14 April Guy Kahane (Oxford):  5. The Ends of Ethics

In each session, a commentator will provide a summary of a chapter and some points for consideration. The post will then be open for discussion.  Hope to see you there!

Yet Another Criticism...

Over at Philosophy, et cetera, Richard has posted a criticism of experimental philosophy.  Readers of this blog should check it out. Unfortunately, I get the sense that he has criticized the entire movement/method upon reading a very limited number of the papers that we have actually written given that the worries he expresses have not only already been raised by others (e.g., Kauppinen, Sosa, and Lynch), but have also been addressed in detail by we experimentalists. Some of you may nevertheless want to join the fray...

Moral Psychology Conference at USF

For people in the Bay Area, or those interested in making a trip to it, there will be a small conference entitled "Mind, Agency, and Emotion: New Perspectives on Moral Psychology" held at the University of San Francisco on November 9th and 10th.

Speakers will include Chrisoula Andreou, John Doris, Anne Jacobson, Jeanette Kennett, Benoit Monin, Shaun Nichols, Jenefer Robinson, and Christine Swanton.

For more information, go here. 

On Intuition Snobbism

Josh Alexander and I, in our recent "Analytic Epistemology & Experimental Philosophy", consider a typology of different ways in which philosophers might understand their own appeals to intuition:

First, it might be supposed that when a philosopher relies on intuitions as evidence, she is relying only on her own personal intuitions as evidence. Let’s call this view, intuition solipsism. Second, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of the class of professional philosophers.  Let’s call this view, intuition elitism. Third, she might be relying on her own intuitions because she takes those intuitions to be representative of the intuitions of a broader class that includes non-philosophers – commonly referred to as “the folk.” Let’s call this view, intuition populism.

But of course there are sub-varieties of these main types, and one type of intuition elitism has recently manifested in a blogging dispute (which Jen linked to) over at "Close Range".  (There are also some interesting issues raised there about experimental design, but they turn out to be less substantial than originally advertised; basically, there are some ways in which some of the early experimental philosophy work could be done better, but none of it adds up to a reason to reject that work.)

The metaphilosophical view on offer there is that philosophers' reports count in ways that our subjects' reports don't -- not necessarily because philosophers are better than ordinary folk per se, but because the standards for what counts as having an intuition at all is pretty high.  Let us (tongue-in-cheekily) call this particular version of elitism, intuition snobbism.  It is in some ways more democratic than elitism, since in principle anyone could have a proper intuition.  But one expects that philosophers will generally have more of them, because of the training and demands of their profession.

Now, here is the main problem for snobbism: if we crank up the dial on what counts as an intuition, then we accordingly will have to dial down our confidence that anyone is actually having a gin-u-wine intuition at any given time.  First, we have to lower our confidence that other philosophers' reports of their intuitions -- their alleged intuitions -- in the journals and talks are, in fact, really reporting intuitions, and not some other form of intellectual seeming.  More broadly, we have to surrender our sense that folks at large concur with us on many of our favorite intuitions.  So, for example, this infamous bit of Jackson -- which I think reflects a kind of reasoning very common among IDR practitioners -- would have to be sacrificed:

...I am sometimes asked – in a tone that suggests that the question is a major objection – why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what governs our classificatory practice, don’t I advocate doing serious opinion polls on people’s responses to various cases? My answer is that I do – when it is necessary...  Everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class of students is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answer they get in the vast majority of cases. But it is also true that often we know that our own case is typical and so can generalize from it to others." (pp. 36-37 of From Metaphysics to Ethics)

We also see this kind of thinking involved in the line that provoked this discussion, Marc Moffet's comment on this post over at the Leiter blog:

After all, while I know plenty of smart linguists who reject [Jason Stanley's] particular theory of the syntactic structure of know-how attributions, it is very rare to find someone who understands the Gettier cases but who doesn't have the Gettier intuitions (i.e., that they are not cases of knowledge).

But merely comprehending the cases isn't enough, on an intuition snob approach.  They need to have, say, the force of necessity; or a strong modal tie to the truth; or to be experienced as internally justifying. 

The intuition snobs also have to give up one of their favorite rhetorical moves against the experimental restrictionists: the tu quoque.  Here's an example from Marc, in our recent exchange: "Moreover, I can't even begin to count the number of people that profess not to trust intuitions as part of their philosphical theorizing, but then turn around and rely on them evidentially in the next breath."  Well... how do you know that that is what they were doing?  Why do you have any confidence at all that it was an intuition that they were relying on?  Maybe it was just a judgment of some other sort, such as a tacit sense of the weight of the empirical evidence.  Indeed, speaking for my own case, I'm pretty sure that unless you saw me using DeMorgan's Law or something rudimentarylike that, it wasn't a snob-worthy intuition that I was using.

Even from a Cartesian standpoint, snobbery would require us to become rather less certain that our own reactions to thought-experiments are proper intuitions.  There are just too many cases in history of various theorists being utterly certain that they had grasped, via the lumen naturale, some inmost metaphysical truth, which most of us now find unintuitive to begin with.  (The Principle of Sufficient Reason is an excellent example, as is most of the arguments for God's existence in the Meditations.  Most folks seem unpersuaded by BonJour's appeal to an intuition of a schematic form of an inductive inference at the end of In Defense of Pure Reason, at least in part because what he puts out as intuitive just doesn't strike everyone as such.)  And there is too much scientific psychology about the ways in which the human mind is all too happy to play tricks on itself, convincing itself where it ought not be convinced, which is why there is all too many scientific norms that are in place precisely to keep us from being able to pull such autochicanery.

So, given the significant costs that snobbery would incur, we might well ask: why be a snob?  There's no descriptive methodological reason to go snobbish -- it's not already built into philosophical practice, and a great many philosophers think that their intuitions can be relied upon because they're already manifested in our quotidian folk practices.  (Those are the "intuition populists" that Josh and I consider.)  For example, a Jacksonian is committed to intuitions being little more than the expression of our shared folk theories underlying our conceptual competences, for example.  See also, say, DeRose on the ordinary language basis for his form of contextualism.  Marc notes, rightly, that everyone is at least appealing to some-sort-of-intuitive-state-or-other, but snobbery is a non-starter as an account of anything that all or even most analtyic philosophers are appealing to.

This gives us a sense in which intuition snobs and restrictionists are similar:  they are both advocating a radical change in philosophical methods.  The  restrictionists are motivated here by the idea, inter alia, that philosophy would do better to take a few methodology lessons from the sciences.  (I think that's what naturalism should really be about, by the way -- not a physicalist ontology, but adding some as-scientific-as-we-can-manage methods to our tool kit.)  And of course we're motivated by our particular findings, even as preliminary as they are.  But where does snobbery get its motivation?  I think it derives mostly from concerns about having a certifiably anti-skeptical epistemology, one in which intuitions can play an important role as a basic (though not infallible or incorrigible) source of evidence.  And, actually, I'm perfectly happy to be on board with something like that, as a matter of fundamental epistemology.

But here's the thing: we're not doing fundamental epistemology here.  We're doing methodology.  And basicness isn't a meaningful category from a methodological standpoint -- we now have oodles & scads & tons of evidence of all sorts that speak to the range & scope of when perception, memory, testimony, & various & sundry forms of intellectual seemings are more, less, or not at all trustworthy.  Maybe only a very special sub-class of those intellectual seemings are capable of getting things off the ground in the first place, and need to have conditions like the aforementioned internally-justifying nature in order to qualify as properly basic.  But none of that matters after we get off the ground, and indeed we've been flying high for a long time now.  Basicness is a starter-motor for the engine of inquiry; once we're in motion, it's finished with its job.

So, where does that leave things?  In the context of the debate over philosophical methodology, intuition snobbery comes at a great price: the general loss of being able to determine, in our own practices, in our collaborators, and in our interlocutors, just when we do or don't have a proper intuition on our hands.  I suspect that this would be a methodologically disastrous price, but it's clearly something that could be argued about (and argued about empirically).  But it's not at all clear that snobbery really buys you very much for that price.  All we get is a bit of epistemological machinery that doesn't do us any methodological good.   Not, on the whole, a good bargain for philosophy.  But isn't it just like snobs to accept only what they take to be the best, regardless of the price? 

;-)

DJC on X-Phi and A-Phi

Dave Chalmers has a nice write-up of the "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" conference over here.

Experimental Philosophy: Criticisms and Responses

A forthcoming issue of Philosophical Explorations is not only going to feature Antti Kauppinen's "The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy" (which has been posted here before), but it will also include replies by both Joshua Knobe--"Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance"--and Eddy Nahmias and me--"The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy."  Since someone over at Garden of Forking Paths recently asked why philosophers ought to care about "unreflective opinions," I thought it might be helpful to kick off yet another round of meta-philosophical debate here on the x-phi blog!

Here are drafts of the three papers:
Download The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Experimental_Philosophy.pdf
Download the_past_and_future_of_experimental_philosophy_final.pdf
Download phil-significance.pdf

Churchland on Decisions, Responsibility, and the Brain

I just found this interesting talk by Patricia Churchland (UCSD) on neurophilosophy, free will, and moral responsibility over at A Brood Crumb.  It's certainly well worth the watch!