“But is this actually philosophy?”
Ethan Landes (Eindhoven University of Technology) is tired of experimental philosophers being asked The Question.
And he’s tired of experimental philosophers “appeasing” those who ask it by “dressing up experimental scholarship up as relevant to armchair analytic philosophy.”
He writes:
Every experimental philosopher has tons of practice doing this. It is how we answer The Question in Q&As. It is how we write grant applications. It is how we pitch ourselves in cover letters for jobs: “Oh sure, if you hire me, I will be conducting empirical research, but actually this is super important to existing debates in philosophy because x, y, and z”. This is the strategy experimental philosophers advise each other to use. It is the strategy I advise others to use.
This sort of appeasement is, by and large, what we see in the academic literature on experimental philosophy. Arguments for experimental philosophy, whether friendly or unfriendly for the armchair, have, in one way or another, positioned themselves as being in service of academic philosophy’s status quo. The stated goal is always improvement upon existing questions and not the creation of something fundamentally new.
He thinks it’s time for a change. His preferred answer to The Question is: “Of course we are doing philosophy. We are just not doing philosophy in their way. Not in the analytic way.”
What if we as experimental philosophers stopped playing this game? What if we pitched experimental philosophy as something historically connected with analytic philosophy but not metaphilosophically connected to it? As its own philosophy with its own methods and its own questions? As a tradition of philosophy as legitimate of an heir to Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, and Quine as analytic philosophy?
For a lot of us, this would certainly be more truthful than how we currently pitch our work. Experimental philosophy is by no means a unified field, but a lot of its members, myself among them, just do not care about or believe in the specific problems and specific questions analytic philosophy is working on. Sure, we can pitch our research as applying to those debates. God knows I could monologue off the cuff for an hour about why my experimental research actually matters to ongoing debates in analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, if we are being honest with ourselves, those problems aren’t what motivates us. They are little more than a gateway drug introducing us to other puzzles about, e.g., knowledge, morality, or the mind. We are now interested in our own things, and they are philosophy because they are deep, deep questions about ourselves and our reality…
As experimental philosophy matures and diverges from the sorts of debates it first emerged to address, we are seeing experimental philosophy becoming an independent philosophical tradition in its own right. A tradition interested in its own set of philosophical questions with its own view of how best to approach them. Consequently, experimental philosophers should celebrate and defend this against analytic philosophy’s more chauvinistic tendencies. We should be (and largely already are) proud that we are pushing the limits of what philosophy can be, shaking up stale literatures and challenging stale methodological assumptions. Why not take the extra step and openly embrace experimental philosophy [as] its own independent tradition?
You can read Landes’ whole post here.* His is one view about the reception of experimental philosophy in the profession today, and I’m wondering if it is shared, both by those who do experimental philosophy and those who do not. We can also take up the question of whether we should, as he suggests, “embrace experimental philosophy [as] its own independent tradition,” what that would mean, and how it fits with the continued broadening of what counts as “respectable” mainstream academic philosophy since the 1970s.
* I’m not crazy about its treatment of “analytic philosophy”, but let’s leave that aside.
Some Related Posts:
- A New Topography of Philosophy: Analytic, Continental, and Philosophy of Science
- The Development of Experimental Philosophy
- Intuitions, Common Sense, and “Earning the Right” to Judgments about Philosophy
- A Plea for Synthetic Philosophy
- Is Epistemology Guilty of “Institutional Neglect of Science”?
- Is There A Sound Philosophical Method?
- Philosophy: More Empirical Than Ever
- Evidence for a Probabilistic Turn in Philosophy
- The Social Turn in Analytic Philosophy: Promises and Perils
- There Is No One Thing Philosophers Should Be Doing
Why not join a psychology department? Aren’t the experiments mostly psychological experiments? Joining a psychology department might involve retraining as a psychologist, but maybe that’s no bad thing.
The problem is that a lot of psychologists wouldn’t consider what experimental philosophers do to quite be psychology either (“experimental philosophy” is not exactly a recognized subdiscipline of psychology, much less something that’s likely to get a tt line in a typical psychology department). A lot of philosophers who work on the border between philosophy and some other discipline are in a similar boat.
Isn’t this just a general problem for people interested in applied areas of inquiry? It’s not clear that it’s philosophy’s job to host applied areas of inquiry like psychology of knowledge, psychology of morality, etc.
The point is that even if it just looks like psychology to *you*, that may not be how many psychologists will regard it. After all, a lot of experimental philosophers are ultimately concerned (as far as I know) with making progress on philosophical issues. They actually care about the philosophy, not just about figuring out human psychology.
And yes, it is a general problem for philosophers who do more interdisciplinary work that it’s unclear what department may be the best fit for them.
+1 I think it would surprise many philosophers to learn how narrow psychology’s scope / training actually is. At least from people I’ve spoken with, who left the discipline for philosophy, questioning conceptual foundations is not really part of the curriculum.
No doubt senior researchers develop a skill for theoretical inquiry, but I’m not aware that philosophical methods are highly prioritized as part of normal coursework and research training.
I’m not sure that experimental philosophy is best thought of as “applied” either!
I don’t think it’s helpful to think about whether it is some discipline’s “job” to host certain types of inquiry. Instead, the question is just which people are most in conversation with people engaged in a particular type of inquiry, and whether they find these conversations valuable enough that they sometimes want to hire these people and/or publish their work.
I’m not sure whether we should be trying to settle questions about the relationship between experimental philosophy and analytic philosophy by a priori means.
Especially since this conception of ‘analytic philosophy’ would seem to predict there would not be, could not be, any such thing as analytic feminism. By careful observation, i.e., sticking my head out into the corridor and looking at who’s around, it seems to me that prediction is not borne out.
Here here. Thank you for saying this, Brian.
Brian, I guess I don’t get what you’re saying. I thought Bill was just making a joke about proponents of experimental philosophy not being fans of a priori reasoning? As a criticism, I doubt it holds water. But I thought it was a good joke.
I agree it’s a good joke! But it’s also a good criticism; the armchair version being presented of what analytic philosophy is doesn’t match up with careful (or even not-so-careful) empirical work on what analytic philosophers do.
I am with Grad Student. There is nothing wrong with experimental philosophy. It is beautiful as it is. It just isn’t philosophy. Asking “deep, deep questions about ourselves and our reality” doesn’t make it philosophy.
It can be very very interesting psychology and it can be more interesting than some of analytic philosophy.
Do you have a clear sense of what *does* make something philosophy? My best approach is that whether something counts as [academic discipline X] is best settled by whether it is most naturally in conversation with [academic discipline X], rather than anything specific about topic or methodology or content, and means that academic disciplines can have weird drifts (the way linguistics did over the 20th century).
(By my account, the work that is called “experimental philosophy” really is more in conversation with other work called “philosophy” than with any work called “psychology”, though it does clearly abut the boundary.)
I guess my impression was that the x-phi revolution foundered not because of philosophers’ impressions about the “philosophy” part, but because of the “experimental” part. While these comments already show that some of the attitudes the author is worried about are real, that’s not the main explanation of people’s negative opinions on the matter. Rather, the negative impressions are about how good the experiments were. There were numerous instances of experimental philosophers having design flaws in their studies, or not very good statistical methodology. People worried that the people in question lacked appropriate training, and that the experiments that resulted didn’t give us very good evidence.
I’m not pressing this as an objection, or a reason why experimental philosophy is bad or should be abandoned (so I’m not providing receipts for these claims; I don’t know if they are even true). Even accepting that this is true of many studies, that hardly shows the movement/field as a whole is a bad one. This is rather to share the sense I have of why philosophers became dissatisfied with x-phi, and some of them gave it up or moved into adjacent fields. And why this isn’t the live and enormous debate it used to be. (My first thought on reading this was “what year is it?”).
This is just not grounded in reality. Experimental philosophers publish regularly in scientific journals, and there is important work showing that xphi research is highly replicable (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-018-0400-9 I really don’t know where you are getting this from. Philosophers did once *say* xphi was “bad psychology,” but funnily enough, psychologists didn’t seem to think this! I appreciate your openness but it is time to update your beliefs.
Clearly the writer feels there is something worthwhile about experimental philosophy that is not analytic philosophy but also not part of any existing empirical science. If so, I can agree with their perspective on not playing ‘the game’, just own it.
I myself am just not clear about what something called experimental philosophy is getting us above and beyond what good analytic philosophy and strong empirical rigor would deliver in tandem.
And then there is this whole ignored bit of continental philosophy and medical humanities. I suppose those aren’t relevant to their specific views on the value of philosophy?
I sympathize with people coming up and remember these experiences. It is, to my mind, profoundly unphilosophical to be closed-minded about the methods we might use to examine, as Ethan puts it, “deep questions about ourselves and our reality.”
At the same time, I have spent a lot of effort and found it immensely rewarding to articulate how empirical research can inform our moral and political theorizing (the topic of my recent book), e.g. about moral motivation, justice, feasibility, and much more. A lot of excellent work has been done by others on these connections and will continue to be done in other areas. That said, I agree with Ethan that people should not be forced into a defensive posture – I think that I diverge slightly from Ethan in thinking that xphi has won the war for a place at the table. And while some people will confidently (with what justification?) proclaim that it is “not philosophy,” as they do about other approaches to philosophy, this is hopefully happening less and less – sadly there is a lag in aspects of the profession that are real and will hopefully be overcome over time. I don’t have time to press people in the comments who make these unsubstantiated assertions, but I would hope they might consider where their authority comes from and how well acquainted they are with experimental and empirical work that is actually being done, not to mention theoretical work on the relevance of empirical research to philosophical questions. I don’t see really productive philosophers making such blanket statements in general, for what it’s worth. The bigger the claim, the more justification you need.
There is much value to the approach and suggestions that Ethan put forward. My suggestion when doubling down is to emphasize, as Ethan puts it, that “deep questions about ourselves and our reality” are philosophical questions. Indeed, when analytic philosophy is going well, I think it aims to address these kinds of questions, even if the more specific questions being discussed, e.g. in a given paper, are at a remove from the questions they ultimately draw inspiration from, the ultimate reasons why we are asking them. So one might continue to ask, how can empirical approaches inform our answers to these very interesting questions, which are often the ones also being examined (directly or indirectly) with a priori methods? A further point: empirical research can often lead us to new and interesting questions that both theoretical and scientific methods can shed light on, and work in experimental philosophy has generated many new literatures that attest to this fact.
I completely agree with what Matt Lindauer says here (and what Brian Weatherson says elsewhere on this thread).
A few decades ago, there was a surge of papers debating questions about the very idea of experimental philosophy. These papers explored questions like: what experimental philosophy even is, what it can potentially accomplish, whether it is a legitimate part of our discipline. As many commentators here have noted, there is now much less discussion of these sorts of questions.
These days, there are lots of papers being published in experimental philosophy, but these papers are not usually defending broad clams about the nature of experimental philosophy itself. Instead, what we see is lots of papers just *doing* experimental work on specific philosophical questions. So these papers are more typically about topics like: causal judgments in cases of double prevention, free choice inferences for disjunctions under the deontic modals, moral judgments about our duties to the dead.
Of course, some philosophers might think that this type of research is mistaken and should stop. If so, they can offer arguments against this type of work, and that can be a helpful contribution to the overall philosophical conversation.
But at this point, it is very clear that the status quo in our discipline is to have some people pursuing detailed research in experimental philosophy. So philosophers who are in favor of continuing this research are defending the status quo, whereas those who think that this type of research should stop are clearly arguing that the practices of our discipline should *change* in a particular respect.
Perhaps. I’m a pluralist about what counts as philosophy. But Ethan’s comments here aren’t going to help the experimental philosopher get many jobs in most philosophy departments: “Experimental philosophy is by no means a unified field, but a lot of its members, myself among them, just do not care about or believe in the specific problems and specific questions analytic philosophy is working on.”
So I think what some people are pushing back on is this. If you don’t care about what many philosophers who get a paycheck from working in a philosophy department are working on, don’t be surprised if they don’t want to hire you! or that they ask you whether what you’re doing is philosophy. That’s why some suggest: maybe he should look to psychology, or some other department. Maybe Ethan is, for example, more interested in what the average psychologist is doing than the average philosopher. Different strokes for different folks!
(Also; as others have noted, people are pushing back on Ethan’s narrow conception of “analytic philosophy” – for most philosophers these days, Aristotle, Leibniz, and Quine count as “analytic”, at least when contrasting with 20th century continental philosophy…) Very few people – even in stereotypical “analytic” departments, solely do conceptual analysis. Most are happy to bring in empirical evidence to answer many questions, for example.
I agree with Reichenbach that asking deep questions about us and our reality doesn’t make it philosophy. All the social sciences and humanities ask some deep questions about us and our reality (and even the natural sciences, depending on what we take “our” reality to include). Part of what makes something philosophy is the method it uses to answer the questions. As far as I can see, the article offers no defense of the philosophical character of the method employed by experimental philosophy.
For a supposed empiricist, the characterization of ‘analytic philosophy’ (“conceptual analysis of key terms”) offered in the post is remarkably inapt and unsupported by what is happening in all of the work commonly characterized as analytic philosophy.
Rutgers is very much an ‘analytic philosophy’ core department if there is one anywhere. But I think it is actually very hard to offer a characterization of what makes my work, Frances Kamm’s work, Liz Camp’s work, Jeff King’s work, Jake Quilty-Dunn’s work, and Ted Sider’s work (etc. etc.) all ‘analytic philosophy.’ It is certainly not because we all engage in conceptual analysis of key terms.
At this point, it strikes me as much more a set of stylistic and argumentative guidelines, rather than anything else. I found this ChatGPT Sol 5.6 summary of Nevin Climenhaga’s own writing style to actually do pretty well at characterizing what the analytic philosophy style is, although many of us also engage much more with relevant empirical work, while (mostly) not taking ourselves to be engaging in empirical work.
“the characterization of ‘analytic philosophy’ (“conceptual analysis of key terms”) offered in the post is remarkably inapt and unsupported by what is happening in all of the work commonly characterized as analytic philosophy”
Can you say more? I know you cite the ChatGPT summary but I’d like to hear from you directly.
Maybe you can actually read some analytic philosophy no? Do you think Rawls, Scanlon, Williams, Nagel, Davidson, etc, are doing mostly (or exclusively) conceptual analysis?
It’s a laughable misconception of what analytic philosophy is. Which is very ironic given that the original post is trying to defend their own conception of philosophy as somehow preferable.
Fair disclosure: I’m someone who, at least in one of my research projects, is very responsive to empirical work, and spend a lot of time reading psychology and cognitive science articles.
I agree with the spirit of Landes idea, but I think the letter is wrong for somewhat important reasons.
In spirit, I think it’s right that we should just own what we do, and “this isn’t philosophy” is a silly and yet pervasive comment that empirically minded philosophers still hear in certain crowds.
I’m not even exactly sure why, in times of shrinking humanities budgets, we are interested in gatekeeping the discipline in this way.
Where I disagree importantly with Landes is – aside from the bad characterization of analytic philosophy – the idea that empirical philosophy doesn’t need to engage with anything related to traditional philosophical questions (or the questions that those questions themselves raised).
If you are not in conversation with philosophers – empirical, analytic, continental, Buddhist, or whatever else – it’s hard for me to see what you’re doing as part of the shared group activity of philosophy. So in that sense, I think it *is* important to make clear the relationship between what we are doing and some variant of a philosophical question asked by those that came before us, even if that often ends up looking like the thing Landes is complaining about.
Actually, one thing that may be very idiosyncratic to my experience is that even my advanced BA and MA students sometimes complain that some paper or topic in class is “not philosophy”, which shows that somehow this attitude is getting passed down as well to the next generation.
(In those contexts, my answer is basically “is it interesting and relevant to what we care about in [topic of the course]? If yes, then I don’t think we should care how it’s labeled.”
“I’m not even exactly sure why, in times of shrinking humanities budgets, we are interested in gatekeeping the discipline in this way.”
Even if philosophy is shrinking, that is no reason to turn it into something else in order to grow. Saving the village by destroying it.
But once a subfield becomes mature, it typically develops its own set of philosophical questions, which may have a tenuous or really no clear relationship to more traditional philosophical questions (e.g., the question of whether to accept countable or finite additivity, to take an example from the philosophy of probability). Why should experimental philosophy be different in that regard?
I think there is a difference between empirically informed philosophy, and experimental philosophy that is worth keeping apart here.
I wrote a longer comment here that I’m not convinced the probability case really is one where the question is only tenuously or unrelated to other questions in the philosophy of probability, but upon reflection I simply don’t know enough about the history of that debate to really know that.
I’m not convinced, but I’m also not confident one way or another.
If these remain transitively connected, then they might remain one discipline. But if they lose that connection, then it’s less clear that it makes sense to call it one discipline (regardless of who gets to keep the name).
What distinguishes experimental philosophy from science? And why are x-phi folk averse to being labeled a science?
I don’t think that labeling this work “science” answers the question of whether or not it should be labeled “philosophy”! (Plenty of non-experimental philosophers have been happy to have their philosophy labeled as “science”.)
Hume would have a stronger response. Philosophy disconnected from Baconian scientific method is speculative and therefore to be considered as a catalogue of errors.