“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.
UPDATE (9/7/26): Landes follows up here with some replies to criticisms of his original piece.
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.
First, what are the criteria you’re using for deciding what counts as philosophy (and hence which areas of research philosophy ought to “host”)? Second, who is entitled to play the role of gatekeeper? Finally, and most importantly, why think anyone ought to be gate-keeping philosophy at all in the first place? You are essentially asking the very question Landes is criticizing without addressing the arguments he provided for setting it aside. Moreover, in the early work by philosophers, they go to great lengths to answer precisely this question, which is why Landes is tired of answering it. The easiest reply is simply to tell critics to read what experimental philosophers repeatedly say in the published research about the metaphilosophical relevance of their work.
Perhaps two examples will help:
Why not think the empirical work in moral psychology by experimental philosophers isn’t an extension of the work by Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, and other philosophers who constantly make empirical claims about moral intuitions, moral judgments, moral decision-making, and the like? Experimental philosophers are simply filling in the gaps in the empirical literature about these claims rather than making pronouncements from the armchair based on their own idiosyncratic intuitions.
Similarly, take philosophers working in action theory who contantly make psychological claims about self-deception, weakness of will, practical irrationality, free will, intentional action, and the like. Sometimes, psychologists have already collected the data relevant to these claims. Sometimes, they have not. If a philosopher runs the relevant studies to shed light on these philosophically relevant empirical claims, that just *is* experimental philosophy.
There is a difference between empirically informed philosophy and experimental philosophy. When the relevant data for adjudicating a philosophical debate have already been collected and philosophers appeal to this data, they are doing the former. When there is a gap in the empirical literature and philosophers (often working with psychologists) fill in this gap, they are doing the latter.
But why isn’t this just psychology, not philosophy? I think this is only a question one would ask if they hadn’t spent any time reading much experimental philosophy and psychology. The experimental design and the presentation of the findings are methodologically similar. But the way the papers are framed and the discussion of the findings are distinctly different. Most work in psychology is not aimed at shedding light on the empirical claims made by philosophers. Experimental philosophers run experiments to shed precisely such light.
This is a very helpful answer, but surely you’re aware it’s at odds with the OP. Your view seems to be that contemporary philosophy implicates or directly includes certain empirical questions — those pertaining to, e.g., moral faculties and judgments, willing and deciding and acting, etc. (I’d add questions about how people understand certain morally important speech acts). The OP, in contrast, says explicitly that he doesn’t care what questions or problems contemporary philosophy is interested in. Ouch! If one doesn’t have doubts about ex-phi belonging in philosophy, whatever that means, those remarks of the OP do an excellent job of generating them. Your comment, on the other hand, nicely counters those doubts, but that’s only because you’re straightforwardly taking a very different, incompatible line from his.
No. It is not mostly psychological experiments. Much of it doesn’t even test on actual people. e.g. there is a tradition of performing analyses of language corpuses (corpi?). A lot of x-phi also involves looking closely at study designs and the philosophical content of what is asked of participants in others’ work. I would also point you to Schwitzgebel 2009 and the associated follow-up studies.
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.)
That is a good question. I don’t have a precise criterion of philosophy to hand. It was clearer to me that experimental philosophy addresses questions which seem psychological and methods common to the psychological sciences. That is why I took it not to be philosophy.
I do think we need some sense of the boundaries of the discipline, largely for the reasons given by Will Connor, below. On the assumption that we all agree that some sorts of inquiry are not philosophy, the burden of a criterion (even a rough one) falls equally on restrictions like me and on the more liberal folks.
In general, I’m more inclined to count a priori inquiry concerned with necessary truth as philosophy and less likely to count a posteriori inquiry concerned with contingent truth. I realize that isn’t an airtight distinction and may not draw the boundaries precisely enough.
Which of the following do you think are philosophical works?
Feels to me that these are all works that lean pretty heavily on a posteriori inquiry concerned with contingent truth, and if they aren’t philosophy, I don’t know what is.
On the other hand, I don’t really think that Terry Tao’s proof that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic sequences of primes was philosophy, although it was a very impressive a priori demonstration of a necessary truth.
I agree that there has to be boundaries. If I was spending my days trying to figure out the elasticity of demand for oil, that seems not to be philosophy. (Though even then it’s hard. It might be a highly relevant input to a philosophical argument if, e.g., we’re talking about climate change. And if so, might not a philosopher want to work on improving its measurement?) But the a posteriori/a priori boundary is miles from where the philosophy/not philosophy boundary is.
Sorry for the delayed reply. You are, of course, right that the a posteriori/a priori boundary is not the non-phil/phil boundary, but I don’t think they are “miles” apart.
Being largely justified a priori still seems a defensible necessary condition for being philosophy. That suffices to exclude “experimental philosophy.”
I don’t have time to think through your interesting list of largely a posteriori books of philosophy. However, a quick look at Singer’s book suggests that the first chapter is the main bit of philosophy in the book at it is largely a priori. Much of the rest of the book simply outlines the (then largely unknown or sublimated) contingent facts which, when combined with the a priori moral framework of the first chapter, generate various concrete moral verdicts.
You agree there must be a boundary (even if a vague one) and I’d be curious if you have a rough first pass at such a boundary.
I’m curious what you think about my argument in my response (linked at the bottom of the main post), which addresses this sort of exclusionary argument. I tried my best to find justification for it, and it came up quite short.
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.
Matthew, That’s precisely right. Moreover, the replication crises in social psychology, medicine, and other empirical fields that arose in the mid aughts made it clear that lots of widely cited studies from these fields failed to replicate. If anything, experimental philosophy did better in this regard, as you noted.
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?
The latter conjunct is doing a lot of work here. Speaking for myself, a big draw of x-phi is precisely their tendency to take empirical research seriously. Perhaps there could be dispute on what “empirical rigor” entails, and some sort of distinction between empirically rigorous philosophy and x-phi can be drawn, but otherwise, I am not sure if x-phiers will find philosophy so lacking if it were empirically rigorous.
Do you get the sense that “non-experimental” analytic philosophers don’t take empirical research seriously?
This is a sincere question, not a gotcha or sarcastic remark. I don’t have a strong view on this issue, and I’m trying to figure out more about it.
Fair enough, but I think expecting that all philosophy be ’empirically’ rigorous, rather than ‘rigorous’ would exclude the vast majority of what makes philosophy both valuable and distinct from the empirical sciences.
I just don’t see why the two are opposed in any way. There are questions which empirical science cannot answer (yet) or whose methods are unable to decide certain questions in any meaningful way until the philosophical work has been done.
I suppose I don’t see how something called x-phil is doing anything different from philosophy or science. It seems more like it takes philosophical priors and then uses empiricism to further justify or narrow conclusions.
Science works almost identically, except that I imagine someone who considers themselves an experimental philosopher is probably more (I would hope) open to the value of philosophical work as a source of well-considered hypotheses for empirical analysis.
I’m curious if this this may be more cultural than anything. Depending on the scientific domain, some are far more open to philosophy than others. I also find that as a particular domain runs into challenges, they will naturally return to philosophy to revisit the norms of their field. I just came back from a conference where philosophy was referenced several times by the researchers there – not just the greatest hits, but modern philosophical research. The answers they were looking for could not be found in experimental work.
The only other thing I can imagine, is if being both a philosopher and scientist is somehow not possible in the modern academic landscape. Not for lack of ability, but perhaps because of all these pre-existing bureaucratic demarcations. Perhaps x-phi is a response to that?
Perhaps a concrete example will help. When those of us philosophers started doing empirical research on people’s beliefs about free will, determinism, and moral responsibility, there was scant empirical data. Indeed, other than a few studies run in the 1970s and 1980s, virtually no empirical work had explored these issues. Experimental philosophers like me started filling in the gaps. Now, there is a sprawling empirical literature on these issues. But in the early aughts, there was very little.
As for continental philosophy and medical humanities, experimental philosophers have explored these fields as well–e.g., the work in moral psychology that directly addresses the empirical claims Nietzsche made about the nature of moral decision-making or the work on people’s judgments about bioethical issues (and the various factors that influence these judgments).
I’ll give you an example. In Virtues of the Mind, Linda Zagzebski says that a virtue is a deep trait of character — the sort of thing we would attribute to someone even after they had died. Then she goes on to offer a theory of intellectual virtues that includes a lot of plausible candidates. When I taught that book some years ago, I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” So I went and actually read a few thousand obituaries and coded them for the terms that were attributed to the dead. I found some patterns that were unsurprising, but also some stuff related to gender and age. I also found some virtues that almost no one writes about, such as having a sense of humor. That’s not experimental, since there is no randomization, but it’s the sort of thing that can inform philosophical reflection.
I also surveyed a bunch of people and asked them what five terms or phrases they would want to be used in their obituary or eulogy. Still not experimental, because no randomization, but whatevs. You could make an experiment out of that kind of study very easily. I just don’t have time.
Speaking of Nietzsche, I applied similar natural language processing methods to his corpus. Again, not experimental because no randomization. And unless someone comes up with a way to resuscitate him, we won’t be getting any new data. But even with these limitations, I was able to detect patterns that a century of commentators had missed.
Anyway, this is not to brag. It’s just to say that of course there are multiple methods in philosophy, and experiments and other empirical methods are obviously among them. Francis Bacon died of cold exposure because he was stuffing chickens full of snow to preserve their bodies, for instance. I don’t recommend following him precisely, but he turned out to be right.
Or, as my former postdoc and now rockstar at Edinburgh once said when she got “the question,” “I’m a philosopher, and I’m doing it, so it’s philosophy.”
Philosophers also brush their teeth, but brushing teeth isn’t philosophy. Or is it?
You didn’t reply to my earlier response to your question. Instead, you simply ignored the arguments I provided and decided to make a flip comment here instead. You’re a graduate student; you should take the arguments seriously and respond accordingly. Just my two cents…
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.
Aristotle, magnificent Aristotle, did empirical research in biology. (He could have bothered to count the number of his wife’s teeth correctly, but that’s a different story).
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.
Knobe’s comments above address the kind of question you’re asking. The early work by experimental philosophy is replete with metaphilosophical discussions about precisely these issues. But rather than reading the actual arguments that experimental philosophers have published, critics ironically make a prior assumptions and claims about what experimental philosophers are (and are not) doing. Like Landes, I, too, got tired of responding to these kinds of claims. It was easier just to say, “read the arguments we have actually made before raising objections that may have already been fully addressed in the experimental philosophy literature (especially the work from the early aughts when experimental philosophy began.”
Landes writes a paper where all he says about the philosophical character of experimental philosophy is that it asks deep questions, I point out that he did not address the issue of the philosophical character of the method of experimental philosophy, and I am supposed to have read work that Landes (and you, of course!) is tired of citing? Oh well…
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.
I suspect that a lot of the commentators here are talking past one another because they have different understandings of what conceptual analysis and x-phi are.
Instead of laughing and naming names, why don’t you start by telling us what those philosophers are doing, and why it differs from conceptual analysis?
The philosophers you mention regularly make empirical claims, appeal to their own intuitive responses to thought experiments (and assume most people share these intuitions), and so on. When the empirical data required to determine the truth of these claims has not been collected by psychologists, experimental philosophers fill in the gaps.
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.
You’re correct! And in the early work in experimental philosophy, we spent a lot of time discussing this difference and explaining why it is important to distinguish between the two.
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.
It would be nice to have a name for a discipline that uses reason (broadly understood) to try to answer questions that are not merely formal (e.g. mathematical) but can’t be settled by figuring out how things actually are, including how people actually think. Sucks that nobody has thought of one.
Antti, It’s good to hear from you! I always appreciated the care you took to engage with experimental philosophers in the early days. Your paper, “The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy” is a classic in the field. Critics of experimental philosophy should start there since you carefully lay out the relevant metaphilosophical issues. Of course, I didn’t (and don’t) agree with you, but your criticisms were a model of charitability–that is, you took experimental philosophy seriously enough to actually read what we wrote! 🙂
That’s too nice of you to say, Thomas! I might as well confess that I’ve been secretly reading some of your and other x-phiers excellent stuff on free will recently, since it’s useful for some Hume stuff I’m working on…
I actually think that’s a fairly good definition of philosophy. (Maybe we’d need to work on that “how things are” bit, but put that aside.)
That definition is capacious enough to include xphi since no experimental philosopher thinks that “how people actually think” *settles* philosophical questions. Instead, the experimentalists’ contention is that the results are relevant to the question.
Consider another situation. If Joe Philosopher provides an argument for p, and Sue Philosopher comes along later and points out that Joe’s argument is flawed, that typically doesn’t settle the question of whether p. But it is relevant. And if Joe’s argument is philosophical, it seems like Sue’s intervention is philosophical too.
Fair enough, Raff! This was roughly the compromise outcome of the debate I had with experimental philosophers when we were young: survey results, psychological explanations of judgments etc. might be some evidence for or against some philosophical position. But then again, that’s plausibly also true for fundamental discoveries in physics or biology, which are not therefore forms of philosophy. You say potato, I say not potato.
If we can use empirical methods to provide evidence for or against philosophical positions, why not incorporate their use into philosophy? Why draw the boundaries of philosophy in a way that excludes this practice?
Whenever I see the phrase “experimental philosophy” I imagine I’m going to read something about Robert Boyle and his contemporaries. And then I’m always a bit disappointed to be reminded that most occurrences of the phrase today concern a recent effort to expand the conception of what philosophy does, yet to do so in a way that invariably remains much more limited than Boyle’s understanding of it, so as to include at most a limited number of experiments adjacent to what you find in psychology departments, but no experiments “touching upon cold” or the like.
While I never confirmed this by quantitative study, long reading of books written between, say, 1500 and 1800, works of literature as well as philosophy (though calling it that somewhat begs the question), makes me confident in saying that throughout that period the primary meaning of “philosopher” referred to the sort of person who makes observations upon cold, or studies birds in air-pumps, or, to cite John Evelyn’s Fumifugium of 1661, takes an interest in “these unwholsome vapours, that distempered the Aer, to the very raising of Storms and tempests; upon which a Philosopher might amply discourse” (italics ours).
When such works are your primary point of reference, and when you do not suffer as most contemporary philosophers do from a presentist prejudice about the correct meanings of words, it can be very hard to understand current debates about whether experimental philosophy is to count as philosophy. Of course it is! This is so well-established in historical usage that it would often have been simply redundant to include the modifier at all: philosophy just was experimental philosophy.
Partisans of the most recent iteration of experimental philosophy would do well to honor this precedent, to invoke it in their own self-justifications, and perhaps even to learn something from the vastly more capacious understanding of experiment that prevailed in it.
So philosophy departments should be open to hiring natural and social scientists? Aren’t there departments specifically for these scientists and their experimental work?
I wouldn’t call someone who studies birds in air pumps a philosopher in the sense that matters here. That seems almost like a reductio of the claim that the historical usage of the term is relevant to drawing today’s disciplinary boundaries
Here is my personal attempt at defining philosophy generally; critique it if you’d like:
“The use of reason to shed light on the fundamental questions of life: that of the good, the beautiful, being/existence, and knowledge/experience.”
I don’t immediately see how the gathering of empirical evidence through experimental means would meet this definition. The data thus gathered might be highly useful for subsequent philosophical work, but one can acknowledge that without gerrymandering the definition to include the gathering itself. If you as a philosopher want to gather data which you can then philosophize upon, that to me is a wonderful thing, but I’m not convinced that the former act itself qualifies as philosophy. To my mind, if that’s what you do, then you’re not a so-called “experimental philosopher,” but rather a “philosopher who happens to perform experiments.”
I also find it a little perplexing that Leibniz, who always distinguished strictly between “the kingdom of causes” and the “kingdom of ends,” physical descriptions and “metaphysical rigor” has been invoked as a proto-experimental philosopher. Was he willing to argue for his metaphysical theses on the basis of his physical observations, absolutely. But he also maintained that the two were separate endeavors that offered different (and differently adequate) explanations of the universe.
So let me get this straight. You think that gathering empirical evidence does not shed light on *experience*. Is that correct?
Well, no, that’s not what I said. The distinction I’m drawing is between (a) gathering empirical evidence and (b) reflecting rationally on that evidence. The former, to me, doesn’t sound like philosophy. The latter does.
I’m entirely happy with experimental philosophy as a branch of philosophy, without further need for justification. To my mind, this is just an obvious extension of the fact that disciplinary boundaries are largely conventional, and will grow and contract as those disciplines push their boundaries and respond to those pushes. Similarly, urban fantasy looks pretty different from the high fantasy we more typically associate wth the fantasy genre, or nordic noir with cozy mysteries, but each of these pairs gets grouped into the same broader genre because of their shared heritage, and because the extent of the deviation is not yet sufficient to fully distinguish them (e.g. the way fantasy grew out of fairy tales).
But I don’t know quite what to make of this:
Now, my not knowing quite what to make of it is absolutely due to my own ignorance of the subfield, and I’ll confess I’m not really sufficiently interested to read and find out, at least not to the extent I anticipate would be required. Thomas Nadelhoffer, at the top of the comments, articulates experimental philosophy and its aims in terms of looking for more empirical foundations for extant philosophical debates. That is the conception of experimental philosophy with which I am familiar.
But… that doesn’t sound like what Landes is describing. What’s described in the quoted material above sounds a lot more independent, and I have no idea what that looks like. It certainly sounds very different from what I thought experimental philosophy was doing (which is what Nadelhoffer describes).
I can easily imagine how, after doing that for a while, we might discover new questions which are not directly motivated from existing philosophical debates. That is, after all, precisely how academic research progresses. There’s nothing surprising in that. Is that all that’s meant? That it began with empirical work on old questions, and that some new questions arose which are independently motivated, and which now take up a significant chunk of the subfield’s attention?
I take it that a central issue here is that the discipline needs—even if only for pragmatic reasons—some way of drawing a boundary around philosophy. Departments have to make decisions about whom to hire, what work to count as relevant for promotion, what to include in undergraduate and graduate curricula, whom to invite to talks, and how to explain the distinctive role and value of philosophy to budget-conscious administrators with (often) little familiarity with and skepticism towards philosophy. The need for some kind of demarcation does not require presupposing that there really is some deep, timeless essence of “true philosophy” nor that we could easily formulate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for philosophy. Nonetheless, concluding that the boundary is vague and leaving it there doesn’t quite work. Departments and institutions still have to make decisions about what’s in and what’s out.
The obvious difficulty is that there seems to be no widely accepted way of demarcating philosophy from non-philosophy that both includes everything currently done under the heading of “experimental philosophy” while excluding a great deal of work in psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, sociology, and related fields. This doesn’t entail that experimental philosophy isn’t philosophy, of course, but it does make asking questions like “What do you mean by ‘philosophy’ such that your work counts but the work of [insert psychologist/behavioral economist/etc.] does not?” reasonable.
People may/do respond to this in totally different ways. Caricaturing: “To hell with demarcation! There’s no principled boundary between philosophy and science, and we should stop pretending otherwise!” vs. “Aha—you can’t give a non-question-begging account of why this is philosophy, so it isn’t really philosophy after all!” I don’t find either of these response compelling and have no interest in trying to adjudicate between them. The lesson I think we should draw is just that there are tough trade-offs on both “sides” (artificially dividing a range of reasonable views into roughly two camps, as above) that we should have a conversation about. Drawing the boundaries of philosophy too narrowly can exclude folks who really belong, entrench bad methodologies, and prevent fruitful exchange and collaboration, yes. But drawing the boundaries too loosely can create more friction in hiring, designing curricula, and evaluating people’s work while also complicating the task of explaining the nature and distinctive value of philosophy at a time when many departments are under increasing pressure to do so.
(Separately, there’s likely more than one demarcation problem here. What should count as philosophical scholarship for hiring purposes, what belongs in an undergraduate curriculum, what grad students should be required to be familiar with it, among other things, need not have the same answer. A department might justifiably not count experimental philosophy as relevant for undergraduate education while being open to hiring someone who happens to work on it. Whether that would ever happen is unclear, and it might be weird, but it’s at least worth noting that we often have multiple different aims or purposes in mind when considering whether x counts as philosophy, and something could presumably count relative to one aim or purpose but not another.)
I don’t know how these trade-offs should be assessed, nor do I have a solution to philosophy’s demarcation problem for anyone. But against this background, I don’t think it is wrongheaded or unreasonable to ask what makes experimental philosophy philosophy. That question can certainly be—and often has been—asked in a super dismissive and disrespectful way, sure, but it can also serve to point out a genuine practical/institutional problem (in addition to an interesting (well, to me…) theoretical issue) that can’t easily be avoided.
I like this answer, I will also just add that, for me, the scope, methods, and goals of a discipline are far more important than what the discipline calls itself. The naming conventions, are, as you said, a proxy for those things – which are used to make budget, curriculum and hiring decisions.
But with that in mind – I do care that Philosophy’s scope is purposefully broad. Some domains are meant to be deep and narrow (e.g. chemistry, neuroscience), others are meant to be broad (e.g. history, literature, philosophy).
I also care about philosophy as a set of methods: logic, argumentation, dialectical, linguistic analysis, interpretation, conceptual engineering, hermeneutics, etc. These methods may be found in other disciplines but they certainly do not receive methodological priority in the vast majority of the sciences, if they are taught at all. Philosophy preserves these are foundational methods of inquiry.
Science is a sub-domain of philosophy which tends toward empiricism, materialism and realism – whose methods favor quantification over qualitative methods. These are all well and good, but so long as most scientific domains exclude philosophical domains which allow for more methodological plurality, it is advantageous to demarcate funding, education, etc. in a way that preserves well rounded ‘ways of knowing’.
If someone prefers to call themselves an experimental philosopher rather than a scientist, it may be signaling something about their methodological pluralism which they feel is distinct from the sciences. For me personally, I would rather just say that I do empirically informed philosophy and leave it at that.
I feel like we are approaching the event horizon where someone insists that Socrates was not a philosopher because he knew nothing and never published.
Two quotes from analytic philosophers:
“The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest sense of the term.” (Sellars)
“The universe is no university.” (Quine, oral tradition)
By these standards of two doyens of analytic philosophy, experimental philosophy is philosophy.
Disciplinary boundaries are something that Kant made up in the critiques. He might have been wrong. He might have also insisted that croque monsieur is not a sandwich when it is open faced, or that vegan oat milk isn’t really milk. Who cares?
This idea that there is *a thing* that is philosophy or philosophical method has got to go. It serves no purpose other than infighting. When Frank Ramsey invented decision theory, he was doing philosophy, and much decision-theory and subsequently game theory are also philosophy.
To be honest, I was a bit shocked to read the original post because, as I put it in my review of Lindauer’s book in _Ethics_, we fought the xphi wars for over two decades, and the bums lost.
David Lewis would sometimes talk about how people responded his arguments for modal realism with what he called “the incredulous stare.” My recommendation to anyone who gets asked whether experimental philosophy (or bioethics, or feminist philosophy, or philosophy of race, or… take your pick) whether is “really” philosophy is to respond with what I hereby dub “the exasperated eyeroll.”
Lately, the etymological account of philosophy (love of wisdom) has seemed increasingly compelling to me. One reason I prefer it to any “deep or fundamental questions” account, to say nothing of synthetic a priori or conceptual analysis accounts, is that it’s likely a better fit with the kind of philosophy many of our students will be most interested in doing in our courses.
If philosophy is love of wisdom, then work in any academic department could probably count as philosophy. That seems fine to me, and, as other commenters have pointed out, is consistent with older understandings of philosophy. So, assigning scholars to a philosophy department, as opposed to another one, can’t be straightforwardly based on how their work aligns with the true nature of philosophy. But we might be able to identify benefits of a having philosophy department anyway. The benefit that’s closest to my interests is teaching students critical thinking, particularly informal logic. The philosophers in philosophy departments are more proficient in these skills than those in any other deparement.
I haven’t thought enough about experimental philosophy, nor about the role of departmental divisions in fostering research, to argue that x-phi belongs in a philosophy as opposed to a psychology department. But I do wonder if the question of which department x-phi “belongs in” would feel less important if it were regarded as one of institutional efficacy, rather than of the true nature of philosophy. On the view I’m suggesting, x-philosophers wouldn’t need to justify their research by relating it to work in analytic philosophy.
This discussion bears more than passing similarity to a thread debating Xphi that appeared on the Leiter Reports in March 2006.
With respect, I don’t think “Is it philosophy?” questions have grown more fecund, or more likely to be resolved, over the intervening 20 years (a verdict I share with many commentators above).
As Jonathan notes, disciplines are naturally thought of as institutional categories, the product of often arbitrary and agonistic administrative histories. While disciplinary boundaries are unquestionably important in the allocation of resources (for better or worse), it is much less clear that they can be used illuminate interesting methodological questions.
To add a footnote that overlaps with some of the other comments: Oh, the irony!
“Analytic philosophy” is like the Berlin Wall – it has been gone for longer than it ever existed in the first place. In that short-lived, straight edge, revolutionary punk rock incarnation, exemplified by both its logicist and empiricist forebears, philosophy defined itself in opposition to “psychology” – whether empirical or metaphysical. (And btw the exact same thing is true of so-called “continental philosophy.”) The fact that there is today no longer a clear dividing line between philosophy and psychology (or sociology, anthropology, politics, etc) is a measure of the historical drift since then. At that time, the new philosophy was created in part to prevent philosophy from being absorbed into other disciplines. Seen in this light, the question today is not, “why don’t experimental philosophers get jobs in other departments?” but rather, “Why is there a separate philosophy department at all?”
Please don’t misunderstand me – I am in favor of philosophy departments. But the nose of the naturalistic camel was let back into the tent well over 50 years ago …
I wrote a blog post related to this debate: Why All Philosophers Ought To Be Radical Naturalists
https://walterveit.substack.com/p/why-all-philosophers-ought-to-be