Topics Philosophy

Question I am interested in and confused by an emerging branch of philosophy called 'experimental philosophy', and was wondering if any good examples could be provided that might help settle this confusion and direct these interests? Could Kinsey be regarded as an experimental philosopher as well as a psychologist, since, in many ways, he helped to revolutionize the way sexuality is defined in terms of a spectrum instead of the reduced dichotomy of gay/straight?

Accepted:
March 11, 2010

Comments

Experimental philosophy does not have a simple definition, but here's one way to describe it: Experimental philosophy involves (a) doing experimental research that is relevant to philosophical debates, and then (b) explicitly considering how such experimental research informs philosophical questions. Lots of scientists do research relevant to philosophical debates (including Kinsey, I suppose, and including lots of physicists, biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, etc.), but typically the only ones who fall into the experimental philosophy camp are the ones who explicitly discuss the way their research relates to philosophical debates (as in b).

Meanwhile, the philosophers who fall into the "x-phi" camp typically do relatively simple survey studies on the way ordinary people answer questions about philosophical thought experiments and then they consider how the results (1) may challenge "armchair" claims about what is intuitive or commonsensical (philosophers often say things like, "It is intuitive that...", "We would all say that such and such is the case," "The ordinary meaning of X is ..."); (2) may challenge the reliability of intuitions about philosophical issues (perhaps because people's intuitions seem to vary across cultures or vary in response to irrelevant features of cases); or (3) help to uncover the psychological sources of our intuitions, experiences, or beliefs. For each of these purposes, philosophers have become increasingly sophisticated in their experimental methods, using more advanced methods and statistics (and in some cases, teaming up with psychologists or other scientists). Though there has been a lot of debate about the value of experimental philosophy, I find it hard to see why, if practiced well, it should not be seen as a valuable supplement to traditional philosophical methods. I hope my work on intuitions about free will has helped shed some light on that ancient debate.

Here's a blog devoted to experimental philosophy: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/

Here's a source for most of the existing papers in experimental philosophy: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/ExperimentalPhilosophy.html

And here's a paper I co-authored on what experimental philosophy is all about (though it's already a bit outdated, since it's a few years old): http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/papers/Past_and_Future_of_Experimental_Philo...

And here's a link to an "experimental epistemology" lab at the University at Buffalo, run by philosopher James Beeb e.

While I think there are useful experiments that philosophers can do that can shed light on what "ordinary" people's "intuitions" are, I wonder if this is really philosophy or merely philosophically-oriented cognitive science.