X-Phi book review

Review - Experimental Philosophy
by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Editors)
Oxford University Press, 2008
Review by Neil Levy, Ph.D.
Aug 12th 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 33)

This anthology mixes together previously published and new work in experimental philosophy, by many of its leading figures (among whom the editors feature prominently). Experimental philosophy is a burgeoning movement that urges philosophers to leave their armchairs and test their philosophical claims empirically. It builds upon but goes further than the movement that Jesse Prinz, in his contribution, calls empirical philosophy; philosophy that turns to existing scientific literature to find evidence for philosophical claim. Experimental philosophy involves philosophers actually getting their hands dirty by conducting experiments.

Part of the motivation for going experimental is that scientists have different concerns to most philosophers, and therefore do not always test the hypotheses in which philosophers are interested. In particular, experimental philosophers are concerned with testing the intuitions of ordinary people. An intuition is, roughly, a disposition to take a claim to be true. Experimental philosophers are interested in intuitions for several different reasons. One is because traditional philosophers have sometimes advanced burden of proof arguments: claiming that some view has the burden of proof because ordinary people find the opposing view intuitive. For instance, some philosophers who hold that incompatibilism is true -- that is, that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism -- argue that the burden of proof is on compatibilists, because ordinary people are incompatibilists. There is now a growing literature testing ordinary people's intuitions on these topics, some of which is reprinted here. The evidence suggests a more complicated pattern than was thought: ordinary people do tend toward incompatibilism, but only under certain conditions. When cases are presented abstractly, so the question is essentially 'can an agent be responsible in a determined world?', subjects lean towards a negative answer, but when the case is presented more concretely, with the details of moral wrongdoing described, subjects tend toward compatibilism. This pattern at least complicates burden of proof arguments.

Other experimental philosophers aim to probe intuitions for a different reason: because it may be that unexpected features of the intuitions of ordinary subjects play a role in the intuitions of professional philosophers as well. The most famous example of experimental philosophy in this mould -- perhaps the most famous example of experimental philosophy at all -- is Joshua Knobe's work on causation, a sample of which is republished here. Knobe found that subjects were more likely to judge a harmful than a helpful action to be intentional, even with all the other details of the situation unchanged. This is surprising, because whether an act is harmful or not seems irrelevant to whether it is intentional. Another famous experiment along these lines, also reprinted here, tested the intuitions of subjects regarding Gettier cases; cases in which a person has a true justified belief, but in which the belief is true only accidentally. The existence of such cases has been taken to be a serious challenge to accounts of knowledge, but Weinberg, Nichols and Stich suggest that they should never have been taken seriously. Their evidence consists in the fact that East Asian subjects are more likely to agree that the agents featured in Gettier cases have knowledge than are Western subjects, as well as more likely than not to attribute knowledge. This suggests, they claim, that when philosophers engage in epistemology, they are not probing the nature of knowledge per se; instead, they are probing the psychologies of a particular group of human beings (Western, white, highly educated and male). Intuition mongering is simply a way of exploring a culturally and geographically specific psychology, and cannot be expected to give us insight into the nature of reality.

Since so much of traditional philosophy turns on the appeal to intuitions, the claim that they are likely to be unreliable as guides to the traditional concerns of philosophers has been very controversial. In their experimental philosophy 'manifesto' which opens this collection, Knobe and Nichols attempt to hose down the fire, by claiming that experimental philosophy does not aim to be imperialistic. Instead, they argue for methodological pluralism. To my mind, this greatly underestimates the threat from experimental philosophy. If the claim that in investigating our intuitions we are doing a kind of ethno-psychology is true, then much of traditional philosophy is in trouble: after reading Weinberg, Nichols and Stich one can't simply go back to doing traditional epistemology.

The choices facing philosophy, in the wake of the experimental philosophy movement, are these: give up reliance on intuition to the extent to which this is possible (either generally or with regard to those areas in which the experiments suggest that intuition-mongering is ethno-psychology, or otherwise suspect) or rebut the experimentalist attack on intuitions. In closing, let me sketch a possible avenue of exploration for those who wish to take this latter tack. In his contribution to this volume, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong notes that many of the experimental results reveal a pattern of conflicting intuitions, depending upon whether the case is described abstractly or concretely (we have seen this pattern in the responses of ordinary people with regard to the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility). Sinnott-Armstrong suggests that this pattern might explain why philosophical puzzles endure. He suggests that the conflicting intuitions might be the product of different reasoning systems, one of which is keyed to abstract presentations and the other concrete. Since we all have both systems, we each feel the pull of both sides of the issue, making it intractable. But because one system is likely to be stronger than the other in each of us, we take sides.

As Sinnott-Armstrong notes, we could break the stalemate if we could adduce non-question-begging grounds for siding with one system or the other. But he sees little hope of that. If his speculation about the nature of the competing systems is correct, he is probably right (Sinnott-Armstrong models the systems on memory systems, one of which seems better at recalling concrete episodes while another seems better at recalling abstract semantic information). But another possibility, one that seems at least as likely to me, is that the competing systems are the systems familiar from dual process theories of the mind. On these theories, one system is fast, automatic, and unconscious, while the other is slow, effortful and conscious. More importantly, the systems have features that often make it rational to discount the output of one and not the other: system 1 is modular, which is to say that is insensitive to a broad range of considerations, inflexible and stereotyped, whereas system 2 is domain-general, flexible and responsive to personal-level beliefs and values. If, as I think is possible, intuitions on one side of some (though perhaps not all) of the debates upon which Sinnott-Armstrong focuses are produced by system 1, while conflicting intuitions are the product of system 2, then we do have good reason to side with one set and disregard the other. Of course, this is simply a hypothesis: assessing it requires both empirical work, to test whether we can assign intuitions in the suggested manner (cognitive load manipulations would be one way to see whether a set of intuitions are produced by system 1), and conceptual work, aimed at testing the claim that we ought rationally to prefer system 2 intuitions to system 1.

Regardless of how that issue turns out, the experimental philosophy movement is certainly one of the most exciting developments in contemporary philosophy, and this volume is the perfect introduction to its methods, concerns and key thinkers.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com