Experimental Philosophy
David Rose and Edouard Machery
Experimental Philosophy is part of a growing trend in philosophy where scientific
methods—formal and empirical—are brought to bear on questions of philosophical
relevance. Experimental philosophers typically rely on the methods of experimental
psychology to study people’s intuitions—which, by stipulation, we take to be relatively
fast, automatic, non-reflective judgments that apply concepts to particular objects,
actions, events, or situations—about philosophical issues (causation, reference, free will,
consciousness, right, permissible, etc.). Intuitions are used in various ways by
philosophers—including as support for conceptual analysis (Goldman, 2007), claims
about common sense (e.g., Block, 2004), and premises of arguments (e.g., Kripke,
1972/1980, 42)—and the methods of experimental philosophers can be brought to bear
on all these uses.
While experimental philosophers are typically concerned with understanding the
psychological sources of intuitions (what mechanisms generate some specific intuition?),
whether a given intuition is widespread (does everybody have a given intuition?), and
whether an intuition-producing mechanism is reliable (does it deliver accurate
information that can be used in philosophical theorizing?), they could also study
behaviors, provided that these are of philosophical relevance. For instance, to determine
whether philosophical training in ethics promotes moral behavior, Eric Schwitzgebel
(2009) has shown that ethics books are more likely to be stolen from university libraries
than comparable books in other fields of philosophy.
So, how exactly do experimental philosophers study intuitions? Experimental
philosophers usually begin by constructing one or several vignettes (hypothetical stories).
They then present the vignette(s) to participants, analyze the data, and consider what the
judgments made by the participants reveal about the intuitions under investigation. The
use of vignettes is not the only way to study intuitions though. Adam Arico, Brian Fiala,
Robert Goldberg, and Shaun Nichols (ms) have measured reaction times to show that
people use low-level cues to classify an entity as an agent and attribute conscious mental
states to the entity. Examining what distinguishes philosophers’ skills from nonphilosophers’, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, Richard Scheines, and
Edouard Machery (2010) relied on a social-psychological questionnaire (the Cognitive
Reflection Test) to highlight an aspect of philosophers’ temperament: These tend to be
more reflective than equally educated non-philosophers. The work of psychologists such
as Mark Alicke, Fiery Cushman, Joshua Greene, Tania Lombrozo, Jen Wright and Liane
Young is also closely related to the interests of experimental philosophers, and these
psychologists routinely use methods that go beyond recording the judgments elicited by
vignettes. For instance, Greene and colleagues have used brain imagery (2001) and
cognitive load methods (2008) to examine the nature of the processes leading to
permissibility judgments in trolley cases.
Although experimental philosophers share much in common, there are some
important differences among experimental philosophers regarding the role that intuitions
should play in philosophy. Roughly, revisionists do not challenge the use of intuitions in
philosophy, but hold that experimental methods can make philosophers’ use of intuitions
more reliable, while eliminativists are skeptical of the role of at least some types of
intuitions in philosophy. We will discuss some prominent examples of each approach in
turn.
There are several types of revisionist projects. Some revisionists uncover what
intuitions people actually have, and use these intuitions to make philosophical arguments.
For example, Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery (forthcoming) have provided some
evidence that ascriptions of conscious mental states depend on the extent to which the
ascribed mental states (seeing a color, smelling an odor, having an emotion, feeling pain,
etc.) are valenced (i.e., have an affective component). These findings challenge the
common philosophical claim that phenomenal consciousness is “the most central and
manifest aspect of our mental lives’’ (Chalmers, 1995, 207). Joshua Knobe (2006,
forthcoming) has provided a wealth of evidence suggesting that, when mental states are
ascribed to an agent on the basis of her behavior, mental state attribution is influenced by
the moral nature of her behavior. For instance, when judging whether someone
intentionally brought about a foreseen side effect, people judge that harmful, but not
helpful side-effects, are intentional. Knobe uses this finding to challenge the view that
folk psychology is essentially used for prediction and explanation. Eddy Nahmias, Steve
Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner (2006) have argued that ordinary people
do not think that free will is incompatible with determinism. Their results suggest that
incompatibilist philosophers have erroneously argued that the burden of proof falls on
compatibilists on the grounds that compatibilism is a counter-intuitive position. Other
revisionists are concerned with how intuitions are generated, often to argue that some
intuitions (but not others) are produced by unreliable mechanisms. Shaun Nichols and
Joshua Knobe’s (2007) results suggest that people tend to have compatibilist intuitions
when thinking in concrete, emotional terms, but that they tend to have incompatibilist
intuitions when thinking in abstract, cognitive terms. They then argue that the
compatibilist intuitions should be discarded on the grounds that they are biased by
emotions.
Eliminativists are concerned with uncovering a variety of unwanted psychological
influences on some types of intuitions, and they use their empirical findings to argue that
these intuitions cannot serve as reliable evidence in philosophical theorizing (Weinberg,
2007). Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich (2004) have
shown, for example, that intuitions about the reference of proper names vary across
cultures: East-Asians are more likely to have descriptivist intuitions, while Westerners
are more likely to have causal-historical intuitions. Since intuitions about reference
appear to be influenced by a factor that arguably should not matter (viz. culture) and
since there is no principled way to privilege certain intuitions, one might reasonably
doubt that intuitions about reference should have a role in the philosophy of language.
Another way to assess the reliability of intuitions is to see whether they are subject to
context and ordering effects. Steve Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg
(2008) have thus provided some evidence that people are less likely to ascribe knowledge
in the Truetemp case when this case is presented after a clear case of knowledge than
when it is presented after a clear case of ignorance. Thus, widespread disagreement and
context, ordering, and demographic effects can all be used by the eliminativist to show
that certain intuitions are unreliable and should thus be eliminated from philosophical
practice.
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