Gödel in Hong Kong

[From n+1]

Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (Eds.). Experimental Philosophy. Oxford University Press. July 2008.

Kwame Anthony Appiah. Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press. January 2008. 

Appeal to intuition has long been one of the core tools, if it can be called that, of the philosophical method. It is intuition, understood as that immediate operation of the mind by which knowledge is obtained without either observation of the world or inference from premises, that both distinguishes the work of the philosopher from that of the scientist, and motivates the familiar accusation that philosophy is a mere “armchair” discipline. Even those philosophers thick-skinned enough to ignore this accusation tend to recognize one deep problem with excessive reliance on the evidence of intuitions: any given intuition, considered in isolation, is only as reliable as the person who has it. But how can we determine that? One obvious way would be to check the intuition against several other intuitions. But then, inevitably, philosophy finds itself drifting into the territory of the social sciences, something the majority of philosophers steadfastly refuse to let happen.

This still very comfortable majority has, in the past few years, come under attack by a small cadre of professional philosophers who have dared to engage openly in the heretical practice of empirical inquiry. Their movement, which has come to be called “x-phi” by some of its adherents, proposes to create an experimental branch of the discipline that will challenge the armchair intuitions with which most philosophers have been content to work, by presenting empirical data showing the extent to which laypeople disagree with these intuitions.

As a historian of 17th-century philosophy, news of what’s hot among my ahistorical colleagues sometimes reaches me only with significant delay (sometimes I even start to imagine that I am a 17th-century philosopher, and that problems such as the nature of God or the sympathy between weapons and wounds are real ones, worthy of real solutions). Until recently I was so out of the loop that when I first heard mention of “experimental philosophy,” in late 2008, I thought to myself, well good, scholars are finally taking an interest in the work of Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, and other great 17th-century philosophers who described their work by this same name. Cavendish for example is the author of Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published in 1666, a work that touches upon a wide variety of questions, including the problem of the reproduction of flies, the possibility of the transformation of wheat into barley, and so on. For her, as for Boyle, there was simply no worry about the relationship between philosophy and science, since philosophy included science. Until the rise of university-based philosophy in the late 18th century, particularly in Germany, philosophy just was whatever it was that curious people took an interest in, and that helped them, even if only just a bit, to piece together the massive puzzle of the world.

Now, this might seem an exceedingly loose definition of “philosophy.” But the historical record could not be clearer: from at least the Renaissance until sometime in the 18th century, philosophy really was everything, or at least everything that involved “inquiring into things below the earth and in the sky,” to cite the famous accusation against Socrates in the Apology. This is the meaning implied in the title of the journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, also founded in 1666, and featuring until this very day, under its now archaic title, articles on everything from the larynx of chimpanzees to the existence of God.  So experimental philosophy is not new, even if “x-phi” is. (In his fine book, Experiments in Ethics, rightly considered to be one of the better measurings-up of the new movement, Kwame Anthony Appiah graciously acknowledges this earlier chapter in the history of experimental philosophy: this debt, one might say. More on this later.)

Cavendish and Boyle had their own battles to fight, to be sure, yet no one doubted that what they were doing counted as philosophy. How things have changed! Far from being the new normal science, x-phi in fact has only captivated a relatively small minority of reputable academic philosophers, who still have to go to great lengths to justify their very existence. A rather nervous self-justificatory pleading is on full display in Knobe and Nichols’ edited volume, the chapters of which, as promised by one of the book’s several blurbs, are sure to “inspire some philosophers and enrage many more.” Yet one might reasonably wonder whether we are not dealing with a somewhat manufactured controversy. X-phi is packaged as revolutionary, while its defenders seem eager to offer constant reassurances of its “continuity with traditional philosophy.” One cannot help but think of the teenager who cuts loose a bit, perhaps sporting the insignias of a radical party, or the symbols of “Eastern” spirituality, but never going so far as to call his right to the family inheritance into doubt. X-phi wants to stay within the comfortable bounds of mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, while also claiming to subvert many of its basic principles. It offers assurances of its continuity with traditional (i.e., 20th-century Anglophone) philosophy, while at the same time insisting upon its newness. Branding the movement as “x-phi” certainly makes it look new, anyway, in much the same way that the X-Games are new, while plain old games have been around forever.

[More here.]

Comments

[Michael]

A fascinating story! Anglo-American philosophy was founded on the bet that we can and should stop doing philosophy-- that the dead ends and false questions of the philosophical tradition must be cleared away so that we can go out into the world and understand it without notions. Does the advent of "experimental philosophy" herald the long-awaited success of this project? Alas, it does not; x-phi represents not an attempt to move beyond philosophy toward the world, but an ill-thought-out hope that asking randomly selected people for their opinions (sorry, "experiment") might somehow resolve the questions that Anglo-American philosophers have manifestly failed to answer on their own.

As you point out, the staggering provincialism of those who are trying to carry through this project bodes ill for its success. That the "discoveries" of experimental philosophy are all things that most educated people outside academic philosophy now take for granted is embarrassing enough; what's more shocking is how thoroughly unable philosophers are to put down their notions and look at the things they now for whatever reason wish to see. Both the questions they ask and the form their inquiry takes guarantee the futility of their efforts; one cannot discover anything new about moral intuition by posing a ridiculously contrived thought experiment to people who would be well justified in wondering why you care about it, but more generally very little can be discovered about either culture or intuition through this sort of "experiment."

Is there anything at all to be learned or gained from this sad, confused discipline? I can't agree that experimental philosophy is headed anywhere productive on its own; the sorts of questions it seems to want answered are posed with a thousand times more sophistication and intelligence in departments of literature, history, anthropology, sociology and psychology every day. To my mind, the trajectory of Anglo-American philosophy from the positivists to the experimentalists is best read as a fable of empiricism: absolute faith in "the facts," taken far enough, will make you unable even to see the facts. You're quite right that historically, philosophy cannot be defined by a specific set of concerns; perhaps we could instead define it as the intuition, in any subject, that although the world is very complicated, well-grounded concepts and well-asked questions will make it a great deal clearer. In other words, "data" is important, but thought even more so. From this perspective the connection between the roots of Anglo-American philosophy and its latest trend becomes clearer: analytic philosophers stopped being able to understand the world because they stopped doing philosophy.

[David M. Frank]

Really enjoyed this piece. Glad to see someone bringing up Robert Boyle in a discussion of x-phi.

However, you make a mistake when you report the "findings" of Stich et al. According to them, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to accept the causal-historical account:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rci.rutgers.edu%2F~stich%2FPublications%2FPapers%2FSemanticIntuitions.pdf&ei=U7r2S5fuCMGC8gbal9nMCg&usg=AFQjCNEDySHCmLjYFTIQXSmWqh-7iQUUMg&sig2=LISH_f_HoujiRdWsULJ3fA

[Justin Smith]

Thanks David, but yikes, that is one major gaffe! I don't know how I let that obvious switching of the two theories' names slip past. I've written to my n+1 editor to correct it for posterity, but let this stand as my public acknowledgment of it. This doesn't have any impact on the criticism, of course, which I still believe is rock-solid, but it does make me want to stand in the corner with a dunce cap for a few hours.