E.G.

In this post I’ll offer a few reasons to be pessimistic about the possibilities for experimental philosophy.  I should admit at the outset that I am not very well familiar with experimental philosophy.  Corrections of any wildly false claims made below would be much appreciated.

Consider the following scenario.  Suppose claims 1, 2 and 3 each seem to be intuitively appealing for independent reasons, yet the conjunction "1 and 2 and 3" yields a contradiction.  At least one of these claims has got to go.  Suppose philosophers have been talking for a long time about the question: Which of these claims can be discarded with the fewest associated philosophic and intuitive costs?  Schools of thought on this question have emerged.  "Anti-1ism" is the view that claim 1 has the least intuitive appeal; "anti-2ism" is the view that claim 2 has the least intuitive appeal; etc.  No consensus seems to be forthcoming; there are respected and prolific anti-1ists, anti-2ists, and anti-3ists.  Anti-1ism, anti-2ism and anti-3ism have thus each become "entrenched in the literature," and each view has developed its own philosophical tradition.

In an environment like this, people with extensive backgrounds in philosophy will be virtually certain to be very familiar with the anti-1ism/anti-2ism/anti-3ism debate.  In that case, it’s likely that their intuitions will have become "polluted."  They will no longer be in a position to know which way their intuitions are telling them to go.  It’s possible, in fact, that what they claim to be "intuitively plausible" will seem downright absurd to an ordinary non-philosopher.  This, I take it, is where experimental philosophy is supposed to come in.  To approach a solution to the "1 2 3 problem," an experimental philosopher might present versions of claims 1, 2 and 3 to a group of ordinary people and ask each subject whether she finds any of the claims difficult to reject.  It might turn out that although ordinary people find it very difficult to reject claims 1 and 3, claim 2 doesn’t have any intuitive appeal at all to them.  If this happens, then the case for anti-2ism will become quite strong.  Progress will have been made on a problem which philosophers have long been unable to solve.

I don’t have any principled objections to the basic approach just described.  The problem I have is somewhat more practical.  To get at the problem I have in mind, suppose that around 75% of philosophers are anti-2ists, 15% are anti-1ists, and 10% are anti-3ists.  If the views are distributed in this way, has the "1 2 3 problem" been solved?  In many disciplines (such as, say, physics), problems which have been "solved" command universal assent.  If only three quarters of all physicists believe X, for instance, then X is fairly controversial, and the "problem of X" should not be regarded as solved.  Perhaps the bar should be lowered for philosophy, though I don’t think so.  Let’s assume, at any rate, that in the scenario above, where the majority view commands the assent of only 75% of all philosophers, the "1 2 3 problem" is not solved; some number higher than 75% would be necessary.

Now suppose that experimental philosophers go out and find a similar distribution of views among educated laypeople.  That is, suppose they find that 75% of laypeople want to reject 2, 15% want to reject 1, and 10% want to reject 3.  What would these experimental philosophers conclude from this finding?  I suspect that they may conclude that rejecting 1 and 3 would come with a very high intuitive cost, and that the numbers strongly favor rejecting 2.  That is, they would take their results to strongly favor anti-2ism.  But this, I claim, wouldn’t be "fair."  It would mean that experimental philosophy would be thought to have "succeeded" without having outperformed the purportedly "failed" traditional philosophical approach.  Why should ordinary philosophy be deemed a failure at 75% if experimental philosophy can succeed with the same number?

As just one example chosen at random, consider this quotation from Nahmias at Experimental Philosophy:

We ran variations with positive action (saving a child from a burning building) and neutral action (going jogging). But in all three cases, a significant majority of subjects (68-79%) judged that Jeremy acted of his own free will or that he was praiseworthy for saving kid (89%) or blameworthy for robbing bank (83%).

For the background on this quotation, I encourage you to follow the link provided above.  The point I want to make is independent of the context in which these results are reported.  My point is this: If 68-79% of all physicists believed that if I let go of this ball, then it might not fall, I’d say there’s no consensus in physics about the laws obeyed by gravity.  Similarly, if only 68-79% of all philosophers would say that in some imagined scenario, Jeremy acted of his own free will, then I’d guess that there’s significant controversy among philosophers about free will.  I claim that the same standards should be applied to the population of laypersons whose intuitions are studied by experimental philosophers. 

At this point, though, I think experimental philosophy faces a dilemma.  If experimental philosophy "lowers the bar," and claims (for instance) that 75% of laypeople is a conclusive result (a success), whereas 75% of philosophers is inconclusive (and a failure), then someone will need to explain why the bar is so much lower for experimental philosophy than it is for regular philosophy.  But if experimental philosophy doesn’t lower the bar, then it seems doubtful that experimental philosophers will be able to provide the high numbers they’ll need to outperform "regular" philosophy.