Experimental Philosophy

[xcthulhu]

I have recently had a few spare moments to look at the subject of experimental philosophy, and given the interdisciplinary nature of this forum I thought I would provide a brief introduction to the subject, and ask a critical question...

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Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent movement in analytical philosophy; to date the movement appears to be composed entirely of philosophy professionals. In experimental philosophy, researchers take into consideration survey responses when analyzing philosophical problems. One main topic appears to be the notion of intention in ethics. The majority of this work has been done by a leading researcher, Joshua Knobe:

Intention, Intentional Action and Moral Considerations by Joshua Knobe
http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/ ... t/64/2/181
doi:10.1093/analys/64.2.181
[Note: I do not have access to this paper - I would be greatful if someone could send this to me!]

Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation by Joshua Knobe
doi:10.1080/09515080307771
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/Side-Effect.pdf

Acting Intentionally and the Side-Effect Effect by Leslie, Knobe and Cohen
http://ares.sjsu.edu/upload/course/cour ... effect.pdf

To be honest, I am not terribly interested in analysis of moral intuitions, so I admit to only having briefly skimmed these papers. They all involve survey analysis of questions asked to audiences involving morality and intention.

Another main topic seems to be cultural relativity of philosophical intuition. There are two main papers:

Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions by Weinberg et al:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publi ... itions.pdf

Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style by Machery et al:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publi ... itions.pdf

Here are synopses of these two papers:

The first paper paper addresses matters of epistemology, or the study of knowledge. In this paper, participants were asked to analyze a series of thought experiments including so called Gettier problems, which are considered challenging puzzles by epistemologists.

The second paper addresses matters of reference typically analyzed in modern metaphysics literature, and draws on thought experiments in Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, which is required graduate reading in philosophy in many universities.

In both papers, the authors follow the work of Richard Nisbett, a cognitive psychologist who has done work establishing cultural difference in cognition between westerners and east asian participants. In both of the above cases, the authors report cultural difference in topics thought to be governed by philosophical intuition (generally considered to be invariant to cultural consideration).

Reponses:

One response to this work is by Marica Bernstein, a biologist at University of Cincinnati. Her paper focuses mainly on methodological problems she sees with experiment design and practice among experimental philosophers. She expresses enthusiasm for the project, but expresses that rigor and attention to important details of experimental are lacking in many experimental philosophy publications:
https://oncourse.iu.edu/access/content/ ... design.pdf

Other responses are primarily rationalistic. Antti Kauppinen discredits the philosophical relevance of the above papers as he outlines:

The point of departure for my critique of experimentalism is that the proponents of this type of experimental philosophy, whether pessimistic or optimistic, ignore the fact that typical philosophical claims of what people would say are elliptical. I identify three characteristic assumptions that philosophers implicitly make about the responses that count as revealing folk concepts – competence of the speaker, absence of performance errors, and basis in semantic rather than pragmatic considerations. I argue that in virtue of these assumptions, intuition statements cannot be interpreted as straightforward predictions, and therefore cannot, for reasons of principle, be tested through the methods of non-participatory social science, without taking a stance on the concepts involved and engaging in dialogue.

He instead suggests expert analysis by professional philosophers as a superior alternative form of analysis (which is considered traditional in academic philosophy):
http://www.helsinki.fi/%7Eamkauppi/phil ... osophy.pdf

Finally, experimental philosophy has enjoyed positive press reviews:
Philosophy's Great Experiment in Prospect Magazine:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/arti ... p?id=10638
What Is Experimental Philosophy? by Joshua Knobe in The Philosopher's Magazine
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.pdf

More publicity may be found on Joshua Knobe's website, as well as critiques and overview papers:
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html

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I hope it is okay, but I have mirrored the above review PCF Philosophy of Science Library.

Are the criticisms of Antti Kauppinen valid, and if so, should we be lead to believe that experimental philosophy do not bear on philosophical questions?

I have other questions involving the direction of this research program as well as methodological concerns, however I think the above question is probably the most controversial.

[lucaspa]

It seems to me that Kaupinnen's first 2 criticisms -- " competence of the speaker, absence of performance errors, " -- can be addressed by the size and choice of people in the surveys. These 2 criticisms would apply to all SF36 respondents in medical research: is the resondent competent to speak on how he feels and is he making mistakes in his answers? It may be an "assumption", but it is one that can be taken as valid unless one can falsify it.

In Duhem terms, Kaupinnen's criticisms fall under questioning one of the underlying hypotheses that we think are true. Kaupinnen should go on to independently test to see if any of the criticisms are true. Did he?

Otherwise, at least in the philosophy of science, philosophers of science have used "experimental" means since Whewell in the mid 1800s. In formulating theories about theory evaluation, for instance, philosophers of science have experimentally tested those against how scientists historically evaluated theories. It was this type of testing that eventually falsified Kuhn's idea of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts.

[xcthulhu]

In Duhem terms, Kaupinnen's criticisms fall under questioning one of the underlying hypotheses that we think are true. Kaupinnen should go on to independently test to see if any of the criticisms are true. Did he?

Sorry for the delay in responding to you, lucaspa. No, Kaupinnen did not do a follow up study; instead, in this essay the author argues that only experts in philosophy are trained to understand the notions of intention in ethics, knowledge in epistemology, and reference in metaphysics. He makes no attempt to refute the findings of others experimentally.

Otherwise, at least in the philosophy of science, philosophers of science have used "experimental" means since Whewell in the mid 1800s. In formulating theories about theory evaluation, for instance, philosophers of science have experimentally tested those against how scientists historically evaluated theories. It was this type of testing that eventually falsified Kuhn's idea of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts.

I've never heard of this - could you post a citation? Thanks!
~XCT

[lucaspa]

Sorry for the delay in responding to you, lucaspa. No, Kaupinnen did not do a follow up study; instead, in this essay the author argues that only experts in philosophy are trained to understand the notions of intention in ethics, knowledge in epistemology, and reference in metaphysics. He makes no attempt to refute the findings of others experimentally.

The studies cited were looking at how ordinary people looked at intentions. I would think that that is valuable. Even if Kaupinnen disagrees with how people view intentions in their enthical decisions, it is valuable to know how ordinary people go about it.

What Kaupinnen may be objecting to is holding up how ordinary people do intentions in ethics and knowledge in epistemology as the gold standard of what those should be or, in some objective sense, are. I suggest you go back and re-read Kaupinnen to see if that is his underlying complaint. That, I think, would have some validity. Just because people do things that way doesn't mean that is valid. OTOH, it may be. So then we would have a separate argument about whether ordinary people's ideas on these subjects is what those ideas actually are.

Otherwise, at least in the philosophy of science, philosophers of science have used "experimental" means since Whewell in the mid 1800s. In formulating theories about theory evaluation, for instance, philosophers of science have experimentally tested those against how scientists historically evaluated theories. It was this type of testing that eventually falsified Kuhn's idea of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts.

I've never heard of this - could you post a citation? Thanks!
~XCT

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=W ... l&resnum=4 You want the first 2 books.

I also suggest Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues edited by Cover and Curd. In the essays, Thomas Kuhn's ideas got evaluated by historical research into how the "paradigm shifts" Kuhn talked about actually happened. It turns out that they didn't happen the way Kuhn stated.

[elizabethpwalker]

i've read some of the books you mentioned here and i'd agree that they really useful

[Lincoln]

So xct....

How has your view on this changed in the intervening two years?

[xcthulhu]

So xct....

How has your view on this changed in the intervening two years?

Well... I never thought much of Kauppinen's criticism of the program of experimental philosophy, since it was grounded rather essentially in the pretentious view that academic philosophers are somehow better equipped than everyone else at determining the philosophical truth in matters of metaphysics and so on.

On the other hand, having created and analyzed surveys myself over the last two years, I realize now that I had no idea how weak experimental philosophy really is at the time I wrote the above. A p-value of <.75 is absurdly common in this field, even the norm in some cases. Subject bias abounds. Wording also plays a huge rôle, and it's purely qualitative and difficult to control. The order of the questions matter, since people can be easily primed in these studies. People can't pay attention for more than 15 minutes on anything even if you pay them, which torques your test design around immensely - you just can't reliably gather a large amount of statistics on any one person because you can't keep them focused for very long. The final results of a survey are always ambiguous to the extreme. And social scientists themselves can be shady - from first hand experience I have seen researchers clearly spin survey results to support their own pet theories, as well as opt out of publishing anything that might contradict their own favored hypotheses.

But you know what they say - if you like sausage, you probably won't anymore after you see how it's made.

TL;DR: I'm dissatisfied with all of the sides of this debate these days, albeit for different reasons.