Experimental Philosophy

Wilkes on thought experiments and personal identity

I was recently doing a literature search on personal identity and came across a fascinating book by Kathleen Wilkes, Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments (OUP, 1988). The book's first chapter is a sustained critique of thought experimentation in this area of metaphysics. I'm certain that her discussion will interest many readers here and I encourage people to take a look for themselves. In the meantime, here are a couple excepts (from the preface and first chapter):

Personal identity has been the stamping-ground for bizarre, entertaining, confusing, and inconclusive thought experiments. To my mind, these alluring fictions have led discussion off on the wrong tracks; moreover, since they rely heavily on imagination and intuition, they lead to no solid or agreed conclusions, since intuitions vary and imaginations fail. ... All of this is of course great fun; and it has fostered a range of startling conclusions. But there are drawbacks to the [thought-experimental] method, and ... the armchair theoretician is bound by constraints upon his use of thought-experimentation that are as stringent as are the constraints that restrict the laboratory researcher. These constraints ... should generally force philosophers back from fiction and fantasy into something much closer to the sober exploration of science fact –– to the study of 'what actually happens when ...',  rather than of 'what might happen if ...' ... What is more, I do not think we need [thought experiments], since there are so many actual puzzle-cases which defy the imagination, but which we none the less have to accept as facts."

 

Herman Cappelen responds to David Chalmers' response

A little while back, we had a post on David Chalmers' critique of Herman Cappelen's recent (and infamous!) book, Philosophy Without Intuitions.

Herman now has a response up, and is looking for some feedback on it.  So, please give it to him!

Don’t Believe the Hype

In his follow-up post to his follow-up post to my post, Joshua Knobe makes the following point:

A couple of years ago, it would have been very reasonable to make claims about philosophical expertise just by drawing on anecdotal experience or general theories from cognitive science, but now that we have this impressive wealth of real data on how philosophical experts make judgments, it seems like any serious attempt to understand these questions will have to take account of the data in some way or other.

I am currently working on a paper in which I make a similar point through an examination of the logic of counterexamples. Here is the abstract (to download the paper, please click here):

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to common opinion, a counterexample against a philosophical theory does not amount to conclusive evidence against that theory. Instead, all that logically follows from an argument that employs the method of counterexamples is a disjunction: ‘either the theory is false or an auxiliary assumption is false’. This is so because, whenever the method of counterexamples is used in an attempt to conclusively refute a philosophical theory, there is a crucial auxiliary assumption that needs to be taken into account. The auxiliary assumption is that intuitions about the subject matter in question (e.g., knowledge or proper names) track the truth about that subject matter.

As an objection to the main argument of the paper, I consider the expertise defense and argue that, even if philosophers are expert intuiters, it still doesn’t follow that the intuitive judgments of “experts” should be given more evidential weight than the intuitive judgments of non-experts.

Comments are welcome and very much appreciated.

What Has Experimental Philosophy Discovered about Expert Intuitions? (Updated)

A little while ago, I put up a post about what research in experimental philosophy has discovered about the intuitions of philosophical experts. In the time since then, there have actually been a few more studies on this topic, so I thought it might be a good idea to put up a revised list.

I'm not sure if others would agree, but my own sense is that we have now reached the point where we have so much systematic empirical research on philosophical expertise that it is no longer intellectually responsible to try addressing these issues without grappling in some way with the findings. A couple of years ago, it would have been very reasonable to make claims about philosophical expertise just by drawing on anecdotal experience or general theories from cognitive science, but now that we have this impressive wealth of real data on how philosophical experts make judgments, it seems like any serious attempt to understand these questions will have to take account of the data in some way or other.

In any case, here is the latest list. Please be sure to let me know if there is anything further I should be adding.

Does the Method of Cases Rest on a Mistake?

Readers who are interested in metaphilosophy, especially the epistemology of intuition, may be interested in the following paper of mine, which is forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology:

Does the Method of Cases Rest on a Mistake?

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the method of cases (namely, the method of using intuitive judgments elicited by intuition pumps as evidence for and/or against philosophical theories) is not a reliable method of generating evidence for and/or against philosophical theories. In other words, the method of cases is unlikely to generate accurate judgments more often than not. This is so because, if perception and intuition are analogous in epistemically relevant respects, then using intuition pumps to elicit intuitive judgments is like using illusions to elicit perceptual judgments. In both cases, judgments are made under bad epistemic circumstances.

As always, comments welcome and much appreciated!

Dart-throwing chimpanzees (Mizrahi)

*Original post by Moti Mizrahi

The expertise defense is an attempt to defend the use of intuitive judgments elicited by hypothetical cases as evidence in philosophical argumentation. Critics of experimental philosophy who appeal to the expertise defense argue that only the intuitive judgments of experts, i.e., professional philosophers, should count as evidence in philosophical arguments.

In “Are Philosophers Expert Intuiters?” (2010), Jonathan Weinberg, Chad Gonnerman, Cameron Buckner and Joshua Alexander argue that one cannot simply use the “expertise card” without the right kind of empirical evidence to back it up. Proponents of the expertise defense have to show that philosophers really do have some kind of philosophical intuitive expertise, especially in light of what the extant scientific literature says about expertise.

Now, I think that a paper of mine on arguments from expert opinion can contribute to this debate in the following way. Those who appeal to the expertise defense are effectively saying that an intuitive judgment J in response to hypothetical case C is more likely to be true when made by a professional philosopher than by a non-philosopher. More generally, J is more likely to be true when made by an expert than by a non-expert. In my paper, however, I argue that this is not the case. Studies on the accuracy of expert opinions show that, on average, expert opinions are only slightly more accurate than chance. As one researcher put it, the experts he studied did no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

If this is correct, then, even if philosophers are expert intuiters, it would still not follow that their expert judgments are significantly more likely to be true than the judgments of non-experts. And if that’s the case, then there is no reason to give the intuitive judgments of professional philosophers more weight in philosophical arguments than to the intuitive judgments of non-philosophers.

I’m curious to know what readers make of this additional challenge to proponents of the expertise defense.

Experimental Philosophy, Broadly Construed

In light of a recent discussion about how to construe experimental philosophy, readers might be interested in a forthcoming paper by David Danks and I where we take up some of these issues.  Here's the abstract:

Experimental philosophy is often held out as a new movement that avoids many of the difficulties that face traditional philosophy. We distinguish two views of experimental philosophy—a narrow view in which philosophers conduct empirical investigations of intuitions and a broad view which says that experimental philosophy is just the co-location in the same body of (i) philosophical naturalism and (ii) the actual practice of cognitive science. These two positions are rarely clearly distinguished in the literature about experimental philosophy, both pro and con. We argue first that the broader view is the only plausible one; discussions of experimental philosophy should recognize that the narrow view is a caricature of experimental philosophy as it is currently done. We then show both how objections to experimental philosophy are transformed and how positive recommendations can be provided by adopting our broad conception of experimental philosophy.

A New Theory of Free Will

Just a quick note that I've published an article in The Philosophical Forum , "A New Theory of Free Will", that may be of interest to experimental philosophers (a free PDF of its penultimate draft is available here).  Here's the abstract: 

This paper shows that several live philosophical and scientific hypotheses – including the holographic principle and multiverse theory in quantum physics, and eternalism and mind-body dualism in philosophy – jointly imply an audacious new theory of free will. This new theory, "Libertarian Compatibilism", holds that the physical world is an eternally existing array of two-dimensional information – a vast number of possible pasts, presents, and futures – and the mind a nonphysical entity or set of properties that "read" that physical information off to subjective conscious awareness (in much the same way that a song written on an ordinary compact-disc is only played when read by an outside medium, i.e. a CD-player). According to this theory, every possible physical “timeline” in the multiverse may be fully physically deterministic or physically-causally closed but each person’s consciousness still entirely free to choose, ex nihilo, outside of the physical order, which physically-closed timeline is experienced by conscious observers. Although Libertarian Compatibilism is admittedly fantastic, I show that it not only follows from several live scientific and philosophical hypotheses, I also show that it (A) is a far more explanatorily powerful model of quantum mechanics than more traditional interpretations (e.g. the Copenhagen, Everett, and Bohmian interpretations), (B) makes determinate, testable empirical predictions in quantum theory, and finally, (C) predicts and explains the very existence of a number of philosophical debates and positions in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will. First, I show that whereas traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics are all philosophically problematic and roughly as ontologically “extravagant” as Libertarian Compatibilism – in that they all posit “unseen” processes – Libertarian Compatibilism is nearly identical in structure to the only working simulation that human beings have ever constructed capable of reproducing (and so explaining) every general feature of quantum mechanics we perceive: namely, massive-multiplayer-online-roleplaying videogames (or MMORPGs). Although I am not the first to suggest that our world is akin to a computer simulation, I show that existing MMORPGs (online simulations we have already created) actually reproduce every general feature of quantum mechanics within their simulated-world reference-frames. Second, I show that existing MMORPGs also replicate (and so explain) many philosophical problems we face in the philosophy of mind, time, personal identity, and free will – all while conforming to the Libertarian Compatibilist model of reality. I conclude, as such, that as fantastic and metaphysically extravagant as Libertarian Compatibilism may initially seem, it may well be true. It explains a number of features of our reality that no other physical or metaphysical theory does.

I suspect that if anyone reading knows how to program simple peer-to-peer (P2P) network simulations, there are probably some of cool experiments one could run to examine the quantum phenomena that I argue inevitably emerge from the structure of any such simulation. The paper may also be of interest to those who do X-phi survey studies on free will.

Heterogeneity of Intuition

Just a quick note to say that I have a new paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that may be of interest to experimental philosophers.  In the paper, I suggest that recent methodological debates in philosophy - many centered around experimental methods and findings - have focused too heavily on the mental state type known as intuition. 

In fact, as I argue in the paper, there are good empirical reasons to believe that 'intuition' encompasses a rather diverse set of cognitive processes.  If this is right, then it may be a mistake to frame debates in terms of, e.g., the reliability of intution as a whole.  The reliability of moral cognition, for example, may tell us very little about the relaibility of epistemological cognition.  I ultimately suggest that philosophers interested in methodology should focus their investigations more narrowly.

The paper is called "Why intuition?", and it is available through 'Early View' on PPR's website, or through my website here.  Comments welcome.

Intuition Mongering (Mizrahi)

*Original post by Moti Mizrahi

I think that readers might be interested in the following short papers:

1. "Intuition Mongering" published in the November issue of The Reasoner
2. "More Intuition Mongering"

Comments and suggestions are more than welcome.