Epilogue
1. In Progress...
My goal has been to sketch a growing movement, focusing on the relationship between experimental philosophy and the belief that philosophical intuitions provide us with important philosophical insight - that we advance philosophical theories on the basis of their ability to explain our philosophical intuitions, and appeal to them as evidence that those theories are true and as reasons for believing as such.
On this way of thinking about philosophy, it makes sense to be interested in studying philosophical cognition, and experimental philosophy has emerged as a fresh approach to studying how people think about philosophical questions, one that makes use of the methods of the social and cognitive sciences. The results have been fascinating, revealing important insights into how our minds work and how we think about philosophical questions. In turn, these insights have raised new concerns about philosophical methodology, and have prompted a return to thinking about what methods we can, and should, employ when doing philosophy. Of course, there is more to be said. There are questions to be answered, details to be secured, and positions to be developed. This is a preliminary study of an ongoing movement, one that has already changed the philosophical landscape, but whose topography is still unfolding.2. A Note on the Methods of Experimental Philosophy
A great deal of work in experimental philosophy involves the use of survey methods; people are asked to read and respond to philosophical vignettes, and these responses are thought to tell us something important about their philosophical intuitions about what is being said.
Recently, concerns have been raised about survey methodology, and it worth spending a moment talking about two of them: one having to do with how people read philosophical vignettes; another having to do with the relationship between survey responses and philosophical intuitions.Accessibility and Addition
We all understand that the information presented in philosophical vignettes is not always accessible to readers, and that sometimes readers draw on information not presented in the philosophical vignettes themselves when forming judgments about what is being said. Some details are missed; others are added. According to Ernest Sosa (2009), this should give experimental philosophers cause for concern. The methods of experimental philosophy involve asking readers to form judgments about philosophical vignettes; how do we know that these readers are drawing only on the information presented in the philosophical vignettes that they are being asked to consider? Sosa worries that, if we are unable to determine whether readers are responding to the same information, then it is not clear what conclusions we should draw from reports of intuitional disagreement. Perhaps intuitional disagreement is only superficial. If different readers are drawing upon different information, then readers who seem to have different intuitions about the same philosophical vignette might turn out simply to have (appropriately) different intuitions about different philosophical vignettes. Sosa suggests that, unless we can rule this out, we should be concerned about the weight that experimental philosophers have placed on cases of intuitional disagreement when challenging traditional philosophical methodology.
As Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg (2007) point out, however, there are two problems with this argument. First, the argument rests on an open empirical hypothesis, namely, that different people systematically interpret philosophical vignettes differently, and that this plays a significant role in the judgments that they form about what is being said.
The only way to substantiate this kind of hypothesis, though, is to engage in careful study of philosophical cognition, and so this argument seems to invite more experimental philosophy, not less. Second, the argument cuts both ways. Whatever problems the argument raises for experimental philosophy, it raises for standard philosophical practice. The argument suggests that, when people talk about specific philosophical vignettes, they can never be sure that they are talking about the same thing. But, if this is true, then not only is it not clear what conclusions we should draw from reports of intuitional disagreement, it is also not clear what conclusions we should draw from reports of intuitional agreement. The upshot is a kind of intuitional skepticism that would be as problematic for traditional philosophical methodology as it is for experimental philosophy.Survey Responses and Philosophical Intuitions
Experimental philosophers ask people to read and respond to philosophical vignettes, but people's responses to questions about philosophical vignettes sometimes reflect not only their judgments about the vignettes themselves, but also sensitivity to conversational context and to specific conversational norms (Schwarz 1995, 1996). According to Simon Cullen (2010), this should worry experimental philosophers, who ask people to read and reflect on philosophical vignettes in strange, and sometimes ambiguous, conversational contexts. Conversational contexts affect how people interpret vignettes and the questions that they are asked about those vignettes, and the more unusual the conversational context the more likely people are to rely on conversational norms to guide their behavior. Cullen believes that this gives us good reason to worry about the relationship between the ways that people respond to questions about philosophical vignettes, what he calls survey responses, and their philosophical intuitions.
Cullen is willing to accept that experimental philosophers have shown that survey responses display interesting patterns of diversity and sensitivity.
That is, he is willing to accept that different people give different survey responses to questions about particular philosophical vignettes, and that survey responses about particular philosophical vignettes vary according to such things as conversational context. What he wants to argue is that this doesn't give us any reason to think that philosophical intuitions display interesting patterns of diversity and sensitivity. But, it is important to see that a lot depends here on what we think philosophical intuitions are supposed to be. If we think that philosophical intuitions should be insensitive to conversational context or conversational norms, for example, then it makes perfect sense to worry that survey responses aren't telling us something important about our philosophical intuitions. The problem is that Cullen gives us no reason for thinking about philosophical intuitions in this way; he simply adopts a view from Kauppinen (2007), according to which philosophical intuitions are insensitive to pragmatic considerations, and lays out the consequences this view has for the relationship between survey responses and philosophical intuitions. But, having been given no reason for adopting this particular view about philosophical intuitions, we have been given no reason to doubt the relationship between survey responses and philosophical intuitions. There may be other reasons to worry about the relationship between survey responses and philosophical intuitions, but, in the absence of an argument that philosophical intuitions are insensitive to pragmatic considerations, evidence that survey responses are sensitive to pragmatic considerations isn't evidence that they don't reveal important things about our philosophical intuitions.One last point is worth making here. Although survey methods continue to play a central role in experimental philosophy, the statistical methods and analyses used by experimental philosophers to study the way that people respond to philosophical vignettes have sharpened considerably in recent years (for example, the use of mediation analyses or structural equation modeling).
And experimental philosophers have also begun to use a wider array of methods from the social and cognitive sciences: behavioral studies, cognitive load studies, eye-tracking studies, fMRI studies, reaction time studies, and so on. Methodological concerns are sure to arise in the future, as they do with any developing empirical project; but, these should be viewed for what they are, namely, opportunities to improve the empirical methods that we use to study philosophical cognition.3. Experimental Philosophy as Revolution
Experimental philosophy is sometimes described as a revolutionary movement - a significant, and maybe even violent, break from more traditional ways of thinking about philosophy. There is a sense in which this characterization is right. Experimental philosophy employs methods more commonly associated with the social and cognitive sciences, has revealed that people think about philosophical questions in quite unexpected ways, and has raised worries about the ways that many of us have come to do philosophy. But it is important to keep in mind that there is nothing revolutionary about the questions that experimental philosophers ask. They are interested in quite traditional questions about the world and ourselves, about how we think about philosophical questions, and about the methods that we employ when trying to answer them - questions that have shaped Western philosophy from its earliest origins in the Socratic dialogues. It is also important to keep in mind that there is a venerable tradition in philosophy of employing new methods to challenge traditional assumptions about how people think about philosophical questions and how best to pursue answers to those questions. As Richard Rorty (1967) writes, in the very first sentence of his introduction to a collection of some of the most important works of an earlier philosophical revolution, “The history of philosophy is punctuated by revolts against the practices of previous philosophers...” The history of philosophy is the history of revolution; experimental philosophy is simply its latest chapter, a chapter that is still being written.