Justin Sytsma

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably, this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4).

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a methodological naturalist approach to philosophy that is distinguished by practitioners employing empirical methods for philosophical purposes. Both the methods employed and the purposes they are put to are diverse. As such, the practice cannot be adequately equated with any single approach, philosophical target, or argumentative gambit. With this diversity in mind, this entry will detail the broad practice of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophy is highly diverse, there are nonetheless prominent themes. Most notably, this includes that experimentalists have often aimed to study “intuitions” concerning concepts of philosophical interest, usually by investigating the judgments of laypeople (or “the folk”). In line with this target, there is also a correspondingly prominent method in x-phi—the use of questionnaires soliciting judgments about short stories (or “vignettes”) based on philosophical thought experiments. After introducing and motivating the practice of experimental philosophy (§1), this entry will discuss the most common methods employed by experimental philosophers (§2) and illustrate how they have been applied to some particularly fruitful topics in contemporary philosophy (§3). In addition to the direct contributions that experimentalists have made to a variety of first-order philosophical debates, experimental philosophy has also had a notable impact on metaphilosophical debates concerning the boundaries of philosophy and the methods that philosophers should employ. Most directly, the practice challenges the presumption of a clean methodological divide between the sciences and philosophy. More critically, some advocates of experimental philosophy have challenged aspects of non-empirical philosophical methodology, prominently including the use of intuitions as evidence for or against philosophical accounts. As such, this entry will conclude with a discussion of the primary ways in which experimental philosophy has featured in the metaphilosophical discussions, while contextualizing this portrayal with regard to the broader practice (§4).

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy.

In this chapter we consider the tension between how pain researchers today typically define pains and the dominant, ordinary conception of pain. While both philosophers and pain scientists define pains as experiences, taking this to correspond with the ordinary understanding, recent empirical evidence indicates that laypeople tend to think of pains as qualities of bodily states. How did this divide come about? To answer, we sketch the historical origins of the concept of pain in Western medicine, providing evidence that during large swaths of this history, medical experts characterized pains as laypeople tend to today—that is, as qualities of bodily states. The conception of pains as experiences that we find in contemporary definitions seems to be a relatively recent development corresponding with changes in the diagnostic tools available to doctors. We argue that this history is important and suggests that the most prominent current scientific definition of pain (IASP) is partly stipulative and fails to match how laypeople most often think of pain. We suggest that either we should acknowledge this stipulative character, or else should amend the IASP definition in a pluralistic fashion that notes both bodily and experiential conceptions of pain.

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, and thus reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states.

Recent research in experimental philosophy indicates that norms matter for the causal attributions that people offer and endorse, at least in English, although there is a good deal of debate concerning why they matter. This includes disagreements about the nature of the question. In line with x-phi’s descriptive program, some researchers have focused on detailing how people use the relevant bits of language. By contrast, researchers working within x-phi’s cognitive program have offered proposals about the underlying mechanisms by which the concept of causation gets expressed in that language. Most prominently the latter includes counterfactual accounts, which explain the impact on norms on causal attributions in terms of the salience of counterfactuals. In this paper, I reconsider the evidence offered by Icard et al. (2017) in favor of a counterfactual explanation, illustrating how subtle differences in the linguistic context provided by the researchers can influence participants responses in important ways. Specifically, I report a large study (N=3678) in which I vary whether participants are asked a question about just one of the two agents involved in the scenarios tested by Icard et al. (single evaluations) or about both agents (joint evaluations). The results suggest two evaluation effects: there is a general trend for the causal ratings in these cases to be lower when using single evaluations than when using joint evaluations, and this difference is larger when the agent asked about violates an injunctive norm. I argue that how we think about these effects has important implications for the plausibility of counterfactual accounts.

Machery et al. (2004) have presented data suggesting that, while most Americans have Kripkean (i.e., causal–historical) intuitions about the reference of proper names, a majority of Chinese have descriptivist intuitions. A common criticism of this reported cross-cultural variation is that the vignettes used to probe their participants’ intuitions about reference, and asked questions that are ambiguous with regard to the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. This chapter describes several studies using vignettes designed to elicit answers that were not ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. The findings suggest that genuine intuitions about semantic reference vary both across and within cultures.

This chapter compares ordinary people's (people with no experience in philosophical studies) and philosophers' notions of subjective experience. It reveals that the understanding of ordinary people is different from the philosophers', and this folk conception of subjective experience is the focus of this chapter; addressing the folk's understanding of perceptual states in relation to bodily sensations and felt emotions. It begins by distinguishing the philosophical conception of subjective experience; followed by an analysis of recent studies about folk intuition. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the empirical account of the folk conception of subjective experience.

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent

What is pain? Perhaps surprisingly the standard answer to this question among philosophers does not derive from research in biology or other sciences but from claims about common sense and thought experiments intended to draw out our intuitions about the nature of pain. This raises a number of issues, among them the question of whether philosophers’ claims about the commonsense conception of pain are accurate. In this chapter, I’ll explore some of the empirical research that has been done on this question in recent years, focusing on the claim that common sense tells us that there can be no unfelt pains. In doing so, I’ll walk through several sets of studies, introducing the empirical research process and illustrating the use of one type of statistical tool—t-tests.

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

This is a comprehensive collection of essays that explores cutting-edge work in experimental philosophy, a radical new movement that applies quantitative and empirical methods to traditional topics of philosophical inquiry. Situates the discipline within Western philosophy and then surveys the work of experimental philosophers by sub-discipline Contains insights for a diverse range of fields, including linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, economics, and psychology, as well as almost every area of professional philosophy today Edited by two rising scholars who take a broad and inclusive approach to the field Offers a complete introduction for non-specialists and students to the central approaches, findings, challenges, and controversies in experimental philosophy.

Many studies find reflective thinking predicts less belief in God or less religiosity — so-called analytic atheism. However, the most widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary abilities such as numeracy, some studies do not detect analytic atheism in every country, experimentally encouraging reflection makes some non-believers more open to believing in God, and one of the most common sources of online research participants seems to produce lower data quality. So analytic atheism may be less than universal or partially explained by confounding factors. To test this, we developed better measures, controlled for more confounds, and employed more recruitment methods. All four studies detected signs of analytic atheism above and beyond confounds (N > 70,000 people from five of six continental regions). We also discovered analytic apostasy: the better a person performed on reflection tests, the greater their odds of losing their religion since childhood — even when controlling for confounds. Analytic apostasy even seemed to explain analytic atheism: apostates were more reflective than others and analytic atheism was undetected after excluding apostates. Religious conversion was rare and unrelated to reflection, suggesting reflection’s relationships to conversion and deconversion are asymmetric. Detected relationships were usually small, indicating reflective thinking is a reliable albeit marginal predictor of apostasy.

In this chapter we consider the tension between how pain researchers today typically define pain and the dominant, ordinary conception of pain. While both philosophers and pain scientists define pains as experiences, taking this to correspond with the ordinary understanding, recent empirical evidence indicates that laypeople tend to think of pains as qualities of bodily states. How did this divide come about? To answer, we sketch the historical origins of the concept of pain in Western medicine, providing evidence that during large swaths of this history, medical experts characterized pains as laypeople tend to today—that is, as qualities of bodily states. The conception of pains as experiences that we find in contemporary definitions seems to be a relatively recent development corresponding with changes in the diagnostic tools available to doctors. We argue that this history is important and suggests that the most prominent current scientific definition of pain (IASP) is partly stipulative and fails to match how laypeople most often think of pain. We suggest that either we should acknowledge this stipulative character, or else should amend the IASP definition in a pluralistic fashion that notes both bodily and experiential conceptions of pain.

Using structural equations and directed graphs, Christopher Hitchcock (2007a) proposes a theory specifying the circumstances in which counterfactual dependence of one event e on another event c is necessary and sufficient for c to count as an actual cause of e. In this paper, we argue that Hitchcock is committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum (FAD) for theories of actual causation. We then show experimentally that Hitchcock’s theory does not satisfy the FAD, and hence, it is in need of revision.

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is relevant to the wrongdoing that elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement.

Many philosophers and brain scientists hold that explaining consciousness is one of the major outstanding problems facing modern science today. One type of consciousness in particular—phenomenal consciousness—is thought to be especially problematic. The reasons given for believing that this phenomenon exists in the first place, however, often hinge on the claim that its existence is simply obvious in ordinary perceptual experience. Such claims motivate the study of people's intuitions about consciousness. In recent years a number of researchers in experimental philosophy of mind have begun to shed light on this area, investigating how people understand and attribute those mental states that have been thought to be phenomenally conscious. In this article, we discuss the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness and detail the work that has been done on the question of whether lay people have this concept.

The standard interpretation of quantum mechanics and a standard interpretation of the awareness of pain have a common feature: Both postulate the existence of an irresolvable duality. Whereas many physicists claim that all particles exhibit particle and wave properties, many philosophers working on pain argue that our awareness of pain is paradoxical, exhibiting both perceptual and introspective characteristics. In this chapter, we offer a pessimistic take on the putative paradox of pain. Specifically, we attempt to resolve the supposed paradox by undermining the reasons offered for accepting the introspective side of the dualism.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6).

The standard view in philosophy is that responsibility entails causation. Most philosophers treat this entailment claim as an evident insight into the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Further, it is taken to be equally obvious that the reversal of this claim does not hold: causation does not entail responsibility. In contrast, Sytsma and Livengood have put forward an account of the use of ordinary causal attributions (statements like “X caused Y”) that contends that they are typically used interchangeably with responsibility attributions (statements like “X is responsible for Y”). Put in terms of the concepts at play in these attributions, this account suggests that the reversal of the entailment claim may also hold, and, a fortiori, there would be mutual entailment between the ordinary concepts of responsibility and causation. Using the cancellability test, we report the results of three pre-registered studies providing empirical evidence that causation and responsibility are mutually entailed by each other.

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “tra- ditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected phil- osophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps rad- ical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 1.2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, rang- ing from the ancients (Section 1.3), to the early moderns (Section 1.4), to the late mod- erns (Section 1.5), and on to the present (Section 1.6).