Experimental philosophy (called x-phi for short) is an emerging field of philosophical inquiryLackman, Jon. The X-Philes Philosophy meets the real world, Slate, March 2, 2006.Appiah, Anthony. The New New Philosophy, The New York Times, December 9, 2007.Appiah, Anthony. The 'Next Big Thing' in Ideas, National Public Radio, January 3, 2008.Shea, Christopher. Against Intuition , Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2008.Edmonds, David and Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy's great experiment , Prospect, March 1, 2009 that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions.The Experimental Philosophy Page Prinz, J. Experimental Philosophy, YouTube September 17, 2007. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy, by experimental philosophers.Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy?. The Philosophers' Magazine, (28) 2004.Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy , Philosophy Compass (2) 2007.Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance, Philosophical Explorations (10) 2007. Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference.Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy? The Philosophers' Magazine (28) 2004. However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.
Disagreement about what experimental philosophy can accomplish is widespread. One claim is that the empirical data gathered by experimental philosophers can have an indirect effect on philosophical questions by allowing for a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes which lead to philosophical intuitions.Knobe, Joshua and Nichols, Shaun. An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto, in Knobe & Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, §2.1. 2008. Others claim that experimental philosophers are engaged in conceptual analysis, but taking advantage of the rigor of quantitative research to aid in that project.Lutz, Sebastian. Ideal Language Philosophy and Experiments on Intuitions . Studia Philosophica Estonica 2.2. Special issue: S. Häggqvist and D. Cohnitz (eds.), The Role of Intuitions in Philosophical Methodology , pp. 117–139. 2009 Finally, some work in experimental philosophy can be seen as undercutting the traditional methods and presuppositions of analytic philosophy.Machery, Edouard. What are Experimental Philosophers Doing? . Experimental Philosophy (blog) , July 30, 2007. Several philosophers have offered criticisms of experimental philosophy.
History
Though, in early modern philosophy, natural philosophy was sometimes referred to as "experimental philosophy", the field associated with the current sense of the term dates its origins around 2000 when a small number of students experimented with the idea of fusing philosophy to the experimental rigor of psychology.
While the modern philosophical movement Experimental Philosophy began growing around 2000, there are some earlier examples, such as Hewson, 1994Hewson, C. (1994). Empirical Evidence Regarding the Folk Psychological Concept of Belief. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 403-408. Hillsdale, New Jersey. (Atlanta, Georgia). and Naess 1938, and the use of empirical methods in philosophy far predates the emergence of the recent academic field. Current experimental philosophers claim that the movement is actually a return to the methodology used by many ancient philosophers. Further, other philosophers like David Hume, René Descartes and John Locke are often held up as early models of philosophers who appealed to empirical methodology.Peter Anstey, "Is x-phi old hat? ", Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Blog, 30 August 2010.
Areas of research
Consciousness The questions of what consciousness is, and what conditions are necessary for conscious thought have been the topic of a long-standing philosophical debate. Experimental philosophers have approached this question by trying to get a better grasp on how exactly people ordinarily understand consciousness. For instance, work by Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) suggests that people may have two different ways of understanding minds generally, and Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery (2009) have written about the proper methodology for studying folk intuitions about consciousness. Bryce Huebner, Michael Bruno, and Hagop Sarkissian (2010) have further argued that the way Westerners understand consciousness differs systematically from the way that East Asians understand consciousness, while Adam Arico (2010) has offered some evidence for thinking that ordinary ascriptions of consciousness are sensitive to framing effects (such as the presence or absence of contextual information). Some of this work has been featured in the Online Consciousness Conference.
Other experimental philosophers have approached the topic of consciousness by trying to uncover the cognitive processes that guide everyday attributions of conscious states. Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, Rob Goldberg, and Shaun Nichols,Arico, A., Fiala, B., Goldberg, R., and Nichols, S. forthcoming. Mind & Language. for instance, propose a cognitive model of mental state attribution (the AGENCY model), whereby an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g., eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. Additionally, Bryce Huebner has argued that ascriptions of mental states rely on two divergent strategies: one sensitive to considerations of an entity's behavior being goal-directed; the other sensitive to considerations of personhood.
Cultural diversity Following the work of Richard Nisbett, which showed that there were differences in a wide range of cognitive tasks between Westerners and East Asians, Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2001) compared epistemic intuitions of Western college students and East Asian college students. The students were presented with a number of cases, including some Gettier cases, and asked to judge whether a person in the case really knew some fact or merely believed it. They found that the East Asian subjects were more likely to judge that the subjects really knew.Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29, pp. 429–460. Later Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Nichols and Stich performed a similar experiment concerning intuitions about the reference of proper names, using cases from Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980). Again, they found significant cultural differences. Each group of authors argued that these cultural variances undermined the philosophical project of using intuitions to create theories of knowledge or reference. However, subsequent studies have consistently failed to replicate Weinberg et al.'s (2001) results for other Gettier cases Kim, M., & Yuan, Y. (2015). No cross-cultural differences in the Gettier car case intuition: A replication study of Weinberg et al. 2001. Episteme, 12(03), 355-361. Seyedsayamdost, H. (2015). On normativity and epistemic intuitions: Failure of replication. Episteme, 12(01), 95-116. Indeed, more recent studies have actually been providing evidence for the opposite hypothesis, that people from a variety of different cultures have surprisingly similar intuitions in these cases.
Determinism and moral responsibility
One area of philosophical inquiry has been concerned with whether or not a person can be morally responsible if their actions are entirely determined, e.g., by the laws of Newtonian physics. One side of the debate, the proponents of which are called 'incompatibilists,' argue that there is no way for people to be morally responsible for immoral acts if they could not have done otherwise. The other side of the debate argues instead that people can be morally responsible for their immoral actions even when they could not have done otherwise. People who hold this view are often referred to as 'compatibilists.' It was generally claimed that non-philosophers were naturally incompatibilist,Nahmias, E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T. & Turner, J. Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility . Philosophical Psychology (18) 2005 p.563 that is they think that if you couldn't have done anything else, then you are not morally responsible for your action. Experimental philosophers have addressed this question by presenting people with hypothetical situations in which it is clear that a person's actions are completely determined. Then the person does something morally wrong, and people are asked if that person is morally responsible for what she or he did. Using this technique Nichols and Knobe (2007) found that "people's responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated" (PDF p.2) and argue that "people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way". (§Papers on Experimental Philosophy and Metaphilosophy)
Epistemology Recent work in experimental epistemology has tested the apparently empirical claims of various epistemological views. For example, research on epistemic contextualism has proceeded by conducting experiments in which ordinary people are presented with vignettes that involve a knowledge ascription.Phelan, M. Evidence that Stakes Don't Matter for Evidence Feltz, A. & Zarpentine, C. Do You Know More When It Matters Less? Philosophical Psychology. Participants are then asked to report on the status of that knowledge ascription. The studies address contextualism by varying the context of the knowledge ascription (for example, how important it is that the agent in the vignette has accurate knowledge). Data gathered thus far show no support for what contextualism says about ordinary use of the term "knows". Other work in experimental epistemology includes, among other things, the examination of moral valence on knowledge attributions (the so-called "epistemic side-effect effect"),Beebe, J. & Buckwalter, W. The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect Mind & Language. of the knowing-that / knowing-how distinction, and of laypeople's intuitions about lying, improper assertion, and insincerity.
Intentional action