IT'S THE DARNDEST THING...:

Against Intuition: Experimental philosophers emerge from the shadows, but skeptics still ask: Is this philosophy? (CHRISTOPER SHEA, 10/03/08, The Chronicle Review)

At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called "intuitions." An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse. Intuitions rear their heads when philosophers write such things as, "In this case, we would surely say …," or, "It would be natural to say …" (for example, that killing a man to harvest his organs is wrong). It is a deeply rooted sense, tested from multiple angles and honed through thought experiments and dialogue. The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers — quite the opposite — but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.

Experimental philosophy has suggested, for example, that people from East Asian cultures may have different intuitions on very basic philosophical questions — reference (what nouns refer to in certain situations), morality, epistemology (what it means "to know" something) — than members of Western societies do. Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.

"If we keep getting the same kind of results with the right kinds of controls and right kind of experiments," says Stich, "then there is a problem with the central method that philosophers have used throughout the 20th century, and for a long time before that": the reliance on armchair intuitions.

Understandably, such claims have met with resistance. "A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem," writes Judith Jarvis Thomson, the noted MIT moral philosopher, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "so I don't see how their empirical investigations can be thought to have any bearing on any philosophical problem — much less help anyone to solve a philosophical problem."

When several philosophers, including Stich and Joshua Knobe, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a few psychologists, including the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, proposed to Oxford University Press a new journal focusing on empirical studies of moral philosophy, they got back one particularly scathing anonymous review: "This group," it said, "is overly impressed by dubious functional MRI studies purporting to demonstrate the neurophysiological underpinnings of moral thinking, and by small sample, 'rinky-dink experiments' conducted by philosophers who are not trained experimentalists."

While much of the proposal authors' work was "perfectly philosophically respectable," the reviewer said, "a great deal of their interest lies in what I can only describe as the desire to eliminate morality (or at least the study of morality) from the discipline of philosophy itself."

...whether you punch an experimental philosopher in the nose when you're in a dirty room or a clean room makes no difference to whether he thinks what you did was right, though he may want you punished more severely in the dirty one.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 29, 2008 11:52 AM