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219On Second Thought: Reflections on the Reflection DefenseIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 4, . 2021.This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful re…Read more
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4The Challenge of Sticking with Intuitions through Thick and ThinIn Booth Anthony Robert & P. Rowbottom Darrell (eds.), Intuitions, Oxford University Press. 2014.Philosophical discussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argument in their defense. Philosophers — on both sides of debates over the standing of this practice — have often called the basis for such appeals ‘intuitions’. But, what might such ‘intuitions’ be, such that they could legitimately serve these purposes? Answers vary, ranging from ‘thin’ conceptions that identify intuitions as …Read more
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155Restrictionism and Reflection: Challenge Deflected, or Simply Redirected?The Monist 95 (2): 200-222. 2012.It has become increasingly popular to respond to experimental philosophy by suggesting that experimental philosophers haven’t been studying the right kind of thing. One version of this kind of response, which we call the reflection defense, involves suggesting both that philosophers are interested only in intuitions that are the product of careful reflection on the details of hypothetical cases and the key concepts involved in those cases, and that these kinds of philosophical intuitions haven’t…Read more
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540Are philosophers expert intuiters?Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 331-355. 2010.Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient …Read more
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77Salient Alternatives in PerspectiveAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (4): 792-810. 2020.This paper empirically investigates how perspective bears on putative salient alternative effects on knowledge ascriptions. Some theoretical accounts predict salient alternative effects in both fir...
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64"Experimental Philosophy and its Critic," ed. Joachim Horvath and Thomas Grundmann; "Experimental Philosophy," Volume 2, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols; and "Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy," ed. Edouard Machery and Elizabeth O’Neill (review)Teaching Philosophy 37 (3): 411-414. 2014.
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294Putting the trolley in order: Experimental philosophy and the loop casePhilosophical Psychology 25 (5): 661-671. 2012.In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's fa…Read more
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420The instability of philosophical intuitions: Running hot and cold on truetempPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1): 138-155. 2008.A growing body of empirical literature challenges philosophers’ reliance on intuitions as evidence based on the fact that intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and socio-economic status. Our research extends this challenge, investigating Lehrer’s appeal to the Truetemp Case as evidence against reliabilism. We found that intuitions in response to this case vary according to whether, and which, other thought experiments are considered first. Our results …Read more
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253Practices make perfect: On minding methodology when mooting metaphilosophyOxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.In this paper, we consider two different attempts to make an end run around the experimentalist challenge to the armchair use of intuitions: one due to Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen, contending that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions, but rather to arguments, in canonical philosophical texts; the other due to Joshua Knobe, arguing that intuitions are so stable that there is in fact no empirical basis for the experimentalist challenge in the first place. We show that a closer attention to…Read more
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60Philosophical Psychology would like to thank the following for contributing to the journal as reviewers this past year: Fred Adams Kenneth AizawaPhilosophical Psychology 25 (1): 161-163. 2012.
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66You Just Can’t Count on (Un)ReliabilityAnalysis 80 (4): 737-751. 2020.Edouard Machery argues that many traditional philosophical questions are beyond our capacity to answer. Answering them seems to require using the method of cases, a method that involves testing answers to philosophical questions against what we think about real or imagined cases. The problem, according to Machery, is that this method has proved unreliable ; what we think about these kinds of cases is both problematically heterogeneous and volatile. His bold solution: abandon the method of cases …Read more
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160This is an appendix containing the stimulus materials for the experiments reported in the paper ‘Salient Alternatives in Perspective.’
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109Framing how we think about disagreementPhilosophical Studies 175 (10): 2539-2566. 2018.Disagreement is a hot topic right now in epistemology, where there is spirited debate between epistemologists who argue that we should be moved by the fact that we disagree and those who argue that we need not. Both sides to this debate often use what is commonly called “the method of cases,” designing hypothetical cases involving peer disagreement and using what we think about those cases as evidence that specific normative theories are true or false, and as reasons for believing as such. With …Read more
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3Knowledge, certainty, and skepticism: A cross-cultural studyIn Masaharu Mizumoto, Stephen P. Stich & Eric S. McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 187-214. 2018.We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositi…Read more
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60Marc Lange: Natural Laws in Scientific Practice (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 222-224. 2004.What is a law of nature? Traditionally, philosophical discussion of this question has been dominated by two prominent alternatives; David Lewis’s best-systems analysis, according to which a law is a regularity that serves as a theorem in our best axiomatization of the facts about the world, and the Dretske-Armstrong-Tooley analysis, which incorporates universals to distinguish laws from mere accidental generalizations. Marc Lange’s first book presents a provocative alternative to this tradition, …Read more
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Claude, A. 73In Sahotra Sarkar (ed.), The Philosophy and History of Molecular Biology: New Perspectives, Kluwer Academic. pp. 249. 1996.
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35Constitutional crises: how understanding constitutive elements in science can help us better understand the nature of conceptual change in science: David J. Stump: Conceptual change and the philosophy of science. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2015, 176 pp, $145 HBMetascience 25 (3): 459-463. 2016.
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624Analytic epistemology and experimental philosophyPhilosophy Compass 2 (1). 2006.It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introd…Read more
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150Competence: What's in? What's out? Who knows?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 329-330. 2010.Knobe's argument rests on a way of distinguishing performance errors from the competencies that delimit our cognitive architecture. We argue that other sorts of evidence than those that he appeals to are needed to illuminate the boundaries of our folk capacities in ways that would support his conclusions.
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446Accentuate the NegativeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2): 297-314. 2010.Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.
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106Experimental Philosophy: An IntroductionPolity. 2012.Experimental philosophy uses experimental research methods from psychology and cognitive science in order to investigate both philosophical and metaphilosophical questions. It explores philosophical questions about the nature of the psychological world - the very structure or meaning of our concepts of things, and about the nature of the non-psychological world - the things themselves. It also explores metaphilosophical questions about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its proper methodolo…Read more
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14Book ReviewMarc Lange, Natural Laws in Scientific Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press , xvi + 349 pp., $65.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 222-224. 2004.
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292Is experimental philosophy philosophically significant?Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 377-389. 2010.Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to ph…Read more