Introduction
When philosophers want to understand the nature of things like knowledge or moral responsibility, they often construct hypothetical cases designed to draw out our philosophical intuitions about these things.
These intuitions play an important role in philosophy, helping philosophers decide which theories to advance and defend, and providing them with a means to do so. This way of thinking about philosophy is most commonly associated with philosophical analysis, which frequently involves arguments that move from people's philosophy intuitions to claims about the truth or plausibility of specific philosophical theories, and some experimental philosophers see themselves as contributing to this philosophical project. They pursue the same philosophical questions as more traditional analytic philosophers, but employ methods that are better suited to the careful study of philosophical intuitions, namely, the methods of the social and cognitive sciences.In this chapter, we will look at some recent work by experimental philosophers that focuses on the role that philosophical intuitions play in metaphysical discussions about the relationship between freedom and moral responsibility and in epistemological discussions about whether knowledge, or our willingness to attribute knowledge, is influenced by stakes (i.e., the personal cost of being wrong) or salience (i.e., what other possibilities are relevant in a given conversational context). Experimental philosophers have sought to contribute to these discussions through careful empirical investigation of the relevant intuitions and the cognitive processes that shape them. The results have been surprising, revealing interesting things not only about our metaphysical and epistemic intuitions but also about the nature of these metaphysical and epistemological discussions and whether philosophical intuitions are well suited to help move these discussions forward at this time.
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