Experimental Philosophy

Experimental Philosophy and Intuitions

Experimental philosophers typically rely on the methods of experimental psychology to study people's intuitions—which, by stipulation, they take to be relatively fast, automatic, nonreflective judgments that apply concepts to particular objects, actions, events, or situations—about philosophical issues (causation, reference, free will, consciousness, right, what is permissible, etc.). Intuitions are used in various ways by philosophers, including as support for conceptual analysis, as claims about common sense, and as premises of arguments. 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 may also study behaviors, provided that these are of philosophical relevance. For instance, in a 2009 attempt to examine whether philosophical training in ethics promotes moral behavior, Eric Schwitzgebel has shown that ethics books are more likely to be stolen from university libraries than comparable books in other fields of philosophy.

The Methods of Experimental Philosophy

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, however. Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, Robert Goldberg, and Shaun Nichols have measured reaction times to show that people use low-level cues to classify an [Page 329]entity as an agent and attribute conscious mental states to the entity. Examining what distinguishes philosophers' skills from nonphilosophers' skills, in 2010 Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, Richard Scheines, and Edouard Machery relied on a social-psychological questionnaire (the Cognitive Reflection Test) to highlight an aspect of philosophers' temperaments: These tend to be more reflective than equally educated nonphilosophers. 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; these psychologists routinely use methods that go beyond recording the judgments elicited by vignettes. For instance, Greene and colleagues have used brain imagery and cognitive load methods (in which people are asked to complete a task while doing another distracting task) to examine the nature of the processes leading to moral judgments.

The Goals of Experimental Philosophy

Although experimental philosophers share much in common, there are some important differences among them 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. The entry will discuss some prominent examples of each approach in turn.

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