Experimental Philosophers are people who are very attached to showing--by giving questionnaires to undergraduates at universities-- that our "philosophical intuitions" vary according to various demographic facts about us. Ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and now, gender are said to greatly affect how we apply concepts to the world.
This general program coheres nicely with a powerful trend in anglophone philosophy: an opposition to a priori (or "armchair") theorizing and a corresponding push towards empirical investigation. Given that (since Russell and Wittgenstein) Philosophy is supposed to be about clarifying our concepts, and (since Quine) concepts are best investigated scientifically, there is no room left for that pesky enlightenment-era habit of trying to deduce, via careful reflection, necessary truths about thought and reality.
It is instructive to note that the most common criticism leveled against your average X-Phi-er is that their data doesn't support their conclusions (see comments in the post linked above). In other words, their science isn't good. One truly wonders why we are calling this enterprise philosophy at all.
Immanuel Kant stands in illuminating contrast:
When I explain in what way concepts can refer to objects a priori, I call that explanation the transcendental deduction of these concepts. And I distinguish transcendental deduction from empirical deduction, which indicates in what way a concept has been acquired through experience [and through reflection on experience], and which therefore concerns not the concept's legitimacy but only the fact whereby we came to possess it. (Critique of Pure Reason, B117, bold emphasis mine)
Here, I find Kant asking the same question I have found myself asking: when we are finished cataloging the myriad of ways in which human beings can have their various concepts formed by experience, what then? How do we judge which conceptual schemes are better or more legitimate than others?
If we say the question is meaningless because it is not empirical, we have allowed our fascination with the empirical to plunge us into a senseless, self-contradictory relativism. If we avoid this path and have the courage to ask the hard questions about concepts, we will need higher-order, a priori, universally shared concepts with which to make such judgments. In short, we will find ourselves drawn towards the very "armchair" reflection we initially rejected.
This is a serious problem, one which any philosopher must confront, and one which Kant nicely summarizes in the passage I've quoted. We can embrace the wonderful regularity and complexity of the empirical world and learn countless things about the human beings are. But such an investigation seems to ignore questions concerning the way human beings ought to be.
This is not, as many have wrongly supposed, some kind of dilemma. We don't have to choose between the empirical and the a priori. Rather, the challenge for philosophers is to find a coherent way of thinking about the world which makes sense of both.
The experimental philosopher's oh-so-trendy rejection of figures like Kant (and Hegel, and Fichte, and Husserl...) in favour of natural science can only impede this project. Kant may have been wrong, but he at least had the courage to actually philosophize.
9 comments:
Hi Nick - I don't think you're giving experimental philosophy a fair shake here. I agree with the thrust of your comments - we need a priori concepts, we should not fetishize the empirical. But I don't think that's what experimental philosophers generally do. The likes of Eric Schwitzgebel don't fall for the glib empirical scientism of an Ayer or a Popper or a Russell. Rather, they are part of that project of trying to "find a coherent way of looking at the world that makes sense of both" the empirical and the a priori - they're just trying to learn more about the empirical side. Even Kant thought it was important to have a "practical anthropology," a study of the way in which a priori concepts are in fact instantiated in real human beings. In the case at hand, there's plenty to be debated about whether "intuitions" are really valid forms of knowledge; but to the extent that one does rely on "intuitions" it surely matters if such intuitions are not as widely shared as one thought they were.
Hey Amod,
I would argue quite strongly that you rarely see work in experimental philosophy connected up to the larger philosophical project that the work is supposed to be contributing to. Almost exclusively, the gist of the project is negative: look, we thought certain intuitions are universal, turns out they're not, philosophers should stop pretending they are.
This contributes almost nothing to the project of actually answering philosophical questions. It takes an obviously stupid position (that empirical concepts are somehow universal or universally valid), knocks it down, and continues on to the next set of intuitions.
Can you provide any instances where I'm wrong? Perhaps my sampling is skewed, I certainly don't follow the literature too closely.
Hi Nick -- I'm glad I discovered this blog, nice work!
On your post: I don't know of anyone in the 20th c. who actually advocates the empiricism you're criticizing. Even the logical empiricists would deny that an utterance is "meaningless because it is not empirical". On the contrary, the ability to express something in language (indeed, independently of empirical evidence!) is what gives a proposition its meaning. I don't know of a single empiricist that doesn't begin with some kind of interpretive framework of this kind.
For the empiricist, "cataloging the myriad of ways in which human beings can have their various concepts formed by experience" is required to evaluate the truth of a sentence, not its meaning. This is indeed a strong restriction on the scope of a priori reasoning -- but it's not a rejection of the very idea. And after all, history suggests that some restriction on the a priori is well in order, if we don't want to get burned. (Kant's "a priori access" to geometric truth comes to mind.)
Hey Bryan,
You are of course right that the most problematic part of Kant's epistemology is his insistence that we have a priori access to certain necessary truths: Euclid and Newton were supposed to have provided us with those, when in fact they did not.
However, I do maintain that he foresaw the central dilemma of naturalistic empiricism in this (and other) passages. You're right to point out that most logical empiricists didn't hold precisely to the doctrine that I described, but I think that the upshot of the doctrine remains the same: all synthetic truths are true by virtue of the conditions of their empirical verification.
I think that our important conceptual judgments are almost exclusively synthetic (causal judgments leap to mind)... and as such any strong naturalist emipricism is committed to the idea that scientific investigation itself will someday uncover the structure of true causal judgments. As Kant says above, this is an extremely problematic position.
Causation isn't "extremely" problematic for the empiricist, is it? The natural empiricist view of causation is just a deflationary view...
I'm afraid I have to call BS on this discussion (which is disappointing, since I've thought very highly of some previous posts). It seems to me that Nick just hasn't read, in any remotely seriously way, much of the actual work of the people who work under the rubric of experimental philosophy. Overall, I'd say that the x-phi crowd is a lot closer to what Nick has in mind than he thinks.
For example, he writes: "I find Kant asking the same question I have found myself asking: when we are finished cataloging the myriad of ways in which human beings can have their various concepts formed by experience, what then? How do we judge which conceptual schemes are better or more legitimate than others?" But that's a question that a number of experimental philosophers _are_ asking, and which they frequently challenge current armchair methods as being inadequate to address! Just look at the exchange between Stich and Sosa in _Stich and His Critics_; of Bishop and Trout's attacks on traditional epistemology's apparently undisturbable conservatism, challenging it as not up to the task of our normative goals; or Weinberg's pragmatist approach.
This is all an absolutely central motivation for observing that many intuitions that are cited as "the" intuition about a case, are in fact surprisingly local, to a culture, or gender, or native language, and so on. It is precisely to point out that the particular set of conceptual dispositions we find ourselves with at this time, may not be as mandatory as we take them to be. If our particular conceptual scheme seems mandatory to us, then there is little room for that question that Nick posed, because if there's just the one scheme, the comparative question can't get off the ground. It is to facilitate, not block, such investigations that experimental philosophers do what they do.
If I can offer a diagnosis, the main problem here is that Nick seems to have been looking at the experimental papers (to whatever extent he has) guided by the assumption that experimental philosophy is motivated by some philosophical form of empiricism. But it isn't. It just isn't -- unless you think that all science can only be so motivated. It's motivated by the very basic idea that, where philosophical theories make empirical predictions, we should test those predictions using the best methods we have for doing so. This is a radically weaker thesis than any sort of thoroughgoing empiricism that makes _all_ questions out to be empirical questions.
I would also note that the third paragraph of the main post is just kinda incoherent on its face. Because some people have attempted to lodge a complaint against the quality of the science in the x-phi, it's hard to see why it qualifies as philosophy? Huh?
I also have no idea what's going on in the last paragraph. I don't think that any experimental philosopher has ever rejected Kant, or even talked about Hegel, Fichte, or Husserl and it's just patently not the case that experimental philosophers on the whole have "rejected" those philosophers. They also don't talk much about Hume, or Descartes, or Locke, or Aristotle, for that matter. But neither do very many contemporary _armchair_ epistemologists or metaphysicians. So that last paragraph seems like a rather misplaced bit of poorly aimed rant.
This bit from the comments is also utterly wrong: "Almost exclusively, the gist of the project is negative...." You can only say this if you haven't read the likes of Knobe, Nahmias, Nadelhoffer, etc., etc. There is a big distinction internal to experimental philosophy, between the "negative program" and the "positive program". The vast majority of the published work is actually in the latter camp.
Overall, I think that, if Nick goes into that literature with a few less preconceptions about what he'll find, he'll like it a lot better.
Dear Anon,
It is one thing to accuse a person of not having read the relevant literature, it's another thing to completely fail to provide examples of how the actual literature is (allegedly) misread.
Instead of going over my long list of exposure to XPhi, I might simply ask you why you think the discipline as a whole does not suffer (for example) from the problem of negativity. In my experience (Stich, Nichols, Knobe, et al) the empirical claims of philosophical theory are often "refuted" (insofar as "our conceptual intuitions" are shown to not really be "ours"). This is not an uncharitable description of the bulk of the work.
OK. So... what next? Your quick description of XPhi provides no real help: while it is true that XPhi papers could be written in order to vindicate some existing theory, this is extremely rare. The initial salvo of paper (re: the gettier intuitions, but also concerning freedom and responsibility) were exclusively designed to show that various philosophical theories had "our intuitions" wrong.
I'll finish here only by noting that my own MA thesis in philosophy drew heavily on data from social psychology in order to test certain empirical claims about creative artists. Trust me, I am no stranger to this process. I simply insist that the process must be accompanied by higher-order reflection on what the results mean. It is this lack of vision which is believe is absent from the XPhi community. (PLEASE prove me wrong.)
"It is one thing to accuse a person of not having read the relevant literature, it's another thing to completely fail to provide examples of how the actual literature is (allegedly) misread." Holy crap, my post was full of such examples! You can start with the Stich, Bishop & Trout, and Weinberg examples, where I even gestured towards what it was in their works that was relevant. And then you can add to that my references to Knobe, Nahmias, and Nadelhoffer which I took (and still take) to pretty much completely falsify your claims about xphi being predominantly negative. If I didn't cite any particular examples of those authors' works, it's only because almost any paper by any of those authors is sufficient as a counterexample to your claims. I honestly do not see how you could have read Joshua Knobe's work with even a modicum of open-minded attention, and then lumped him in so casually with the likes of Stich.
I guess this needs to be spelled out, since you're so unfortunately invested in not reading the papers seriously. Knobe has positive philosophical goals he's trying to reach, he's very clear about them (in terms of correcting what he sees as a common misunderstanding about folk psychology, which he wants to understand as integrally connected to normative evaluation), and he's also very clear about how he thinks his work supports that goal. Completely positive through & through.
Ditto with the free will people: their papers tend to be chock full of references from the mainstream free will literature where people appeal to what they take to be the folk intuitions,but with different sides making different claims about what those intuitions are; and the experimental philosophers then discuss at length as to why that should matter, and then they go out and try to see what the folk intuitions really are. This is all aimed at trying precisely to _contribute_ to the ongoing free will debates. The metaphilosophy is transparent throughout this literature, and relentlessly positive.
The folks working on concepts of consciousness these days, similarly, have positive philosophical projects they take that work to help forward.
Even the negative people are transparent in a very similar way: they observe philosophers appealing to intuitions as evidence, but intuitions are the sort of evidence that philosophers take it to be, then it needs to meet some conditions of stability, several of which are articulated early on in the Weinberg, Nichols, and Stitch paper, and they take their studies to show that those conditions look like they might well not be met. And, again, I refer you to the examples _that I already gave_ of people in the "negative" part of xphi trying to ask exactly the questions you say are the important ones that Kant wanted us to ask. If the negative xphi people are negative, it is in the way of someone trying to tell the drunk to stop looking for his car keys under the streetlamp, even though it's so awfully convenient & easy to do so, because we have good reason to think that that's just not where the keys are located.
You ask for cases of "higher-order reflection" on what x-phi is all about. Here, very much off the top of my head: the "Manifesto" in the Nichols & Knobe volume; the exchange between Kaupinnen, Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, and Knobe in Philosophical Explorations; the Alexander & Weinberg, Knobe, or Griffiths & Stotz Philosophy Compass papers; or the Doris & Plakias work in moral psychology (as well as numerous papers by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong); or the Prinz paper in the Nichols & Knobe volume. And that's not even counting the numerous "meta"-oriented posts on the experimental philosophy blog, or Eric Schwitzgebel's blog. Experimental philosophy is, if anything, _obsessively_ meta.
It appears a little disheartening to find out that X-phiers are skeptical of the same a priori projects that constitute much of the history of philosophy. Anonymous X-Phier put it, "many intuitions that are cited as "the" intuition about a case, are in fact surprisingly local, to a culture, or gender, or native language, and so on."
If that is where you have wound up, then I should bring to light one small tidbit. There is no difference between you and Gadamer or Heidegger on this very point. You've simply made the hermeneutic barriers to understanding the criteria by which actual understanding of the world is achieved. That's nothing new, and I never needed a qualitative survey to give me that insight.
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