Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. (...) the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing responses to experiments, and the reliability of metalinguistic judgments are also assessed. (shrink)

The role of intuition in Kripke's arguments for the causal-historical theory of reference has been a topic of recent debate, particularly in light of empirical work on these intuitions. In this paper, I develop three interpretations of the role intuition might play in Kripke's arguments. The first aim of this exercise is to help clarify the options available to interpreters of Kripke, and the consequences for the experimental investigation of Kripkean intuitions. The second aim is to show that understanding (...) the role of intuition in Kripke's arguments, and in other arguments commonly interpreted as ?appeals to intuition? requires that we pay careful attention to the argumentative context and theoretical commitments of the work in question. The interpretations of Kripke developed here provide a set of options which might be adapted to other arguments to help clarify what role (if any) intuition plays. (shrink)

The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of (...) publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard Machery, John Turri, Nat Hansen, et al., are found to be the most productive philosophers, testifying their leading positions in this field. Journals, instead of books, are the major homes of works in this area. The analysis also yields a list of influential works, including the seminal work “Semantics, Cross-cultural Style” and other significant publications on the semantics of various types of expressions. Relatedly, the major research themes are found to include not only intuitions about the reference of proper names, but also a wide array of philosophically and linguistically interesting issues like the meaning of color adjectives, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste, the norms of assertions and the essence of lies, etc. These findings showcase that experimental philosophy of language has broadened the research territory and offered deep insights into central issues of philosophy of language that are beyond the reach of the conventional armchair methodology. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, (...) no connection has been made between developments in experimental philosophy and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical (...) naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue (...) are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and (...) presents two experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from (...) several areas of experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers (...) cannot help making stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In the heyday of linguistic philosophy an experimental philosophy movement was born, and this chapter tells its story, both in its historical and philosophical context and as it is connected to controversies about experimental philosophy today. From its humble beginnings at the Vienna Circle, the movement matured into a vibrant research program at Oslo, and sought adventure at Berkeley thereafter. The harsh and uncharitable reaction it met is surprising but understandable in light of disciplinary tensions (...) and the legacy of antipsychologism—sentiments and arguments which have reemerged today, albeit in modified form. Yet the research at Oslo remained unperturbed and it flourished in both its theory and its applications, which spanned the philosophical domain. The Berkeley years were short but intense, as exemplified by their engagement with ordinary-language philosophy, J.L. Austin, and the theory of communicative significance. (shrink)

David Berman's work on experimental philosophy is a defence of a traditional approach to empiricism against both contemporary rationalism and logico-analytic philosophy. While his approach focuses on empirical evidence in support of theoretical claims, Berman distinguishes his position from the kind of experimentalism recently risen from the analytic world. After having highlighted the merit of Berman's approach to philosophy, I comment on his main views, addressing particularly the relationship between language, intuitions and experience from the (...) standpoint of the epistemological topic of belief justification. (shrink)

Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of (...) language, including questions in social psychology and cognitive science more generally. The chapter also reviews empirical work on the relationship between generics and cognition. Existing empirical work strongly supports the generics‐as‐defaults hypothesis: the hypothesis that generics reflect a cognitively default, fundamental mode of generalizing in humans. Finally, the chapter elucidates evidence that generic language and generic modes of generalizing play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. (shrink)

The expression experimental philosophy has taken on a lively interest in recent research on Nietzsche, as the growing shows number of interpreters. This reflection occupied a small place in the discussions at the end of the 20th century; a situation that changed dramatically at the beginning of our century. To understanding the questions that revolve around this philosophy, it is necessary to consider its limits and scope and, above all, the space it occupies in the work of (...) the German thinker. Through a philological approach, the development of the latest works and different uses of the concept, we will be able to highlight the of this project promising. This work aims to bring the reader closer, due to the novelty in the Spanish language, to this discussion that is attracting the gaze of those interested in philosopher of Röcken. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We (...) demonstrate how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the twenty-first century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. It is, therefore, surprising that the philosophy of medicine has so far not drawn on the tools of experimental philosophy in the context of a particular conceptual debate that has overshadowed all others in the field: the long-standing dispute between so-called naturalists and (...) normativists about the concepts of health and disease. In this paper, I defend and advocate the use of empirical methods to inform and advance this and other debates within the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

In this chapter, I present a comprehensive review of the literature on experimental philosophy of aesthetics.

Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the cases described. We examine two possible sources of difference: Philosophers could be better at (...) deploying concepts, and this could make them less susceptible to comprehension biases (‘linguistic expertise objection’). Alternatively, exposure to different patterns of linguistic usage could render philosophers vulnerable to a fundamental comprehension bias, the linguistic salience bias, at different points (‘linguistic usage objection’). Together, these objections mount a novel ‘master argument’ against experimental philosophy. To develop and empirically assess this argument, we employ corpus analysis and distributional semantic analysis and elicit plausibility ratings from academic philosophers and psychology undergraduates. Our findings suggest philosophers are better at deploying concepts than laypeople but are susceptible to the linguistic salience bias to a similar extent and at similar points. We identify methodological consequences for experimental philosophy and for philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §1 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, (...) and natural theology, on the other. §2 offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it’s important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §3 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed? (shrink)

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative (...) evidence to evaluate the standard story of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should (...) be expected to follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Robert Saudek, a Czech graphologist, journalist, diplomat, playwright, and novelist, was heavily influenced in his youth by Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. Saudek later became a pioneer in the field of psychological graphology. In this article, I examine the impact of Mauthner’s critique on Saudek’s work and evaluate whether Saudek’s approach to graphology aligns with Mauthner’s ideas. I argue that, although Saudek’s graphology is rooted in Mauthner’s critique of experimental psychology, there remains room for further development in the (...) field of psychological graphology, centering on the analysis of language. With this in mind, I compare Saudek’s method and contemporary conceptual metaphor theory. I further suggest that Saudek’s extensive use of the autographs of well-known figures follows a method of working from examples, or specimens, which is not uncommon in the philosophy of science. Based on these findings, I propose a way of understanding Saudek’s graphology that challenges its characterization as a pseudoscience. (shrink)

الكيمياء علمٌ تجريبي بطبيعته، يشتغل معمليًا بالجواهر تحليلاً وتركيبًا، ويُقيم بناءاته النسقية استرشادًا بقواعد محددة تحكم إجراءات البحث التجريبي ونتائجه. وكشأن أي نشاط علمي آخر، تستلزم الممارسة الكيميائية لغة جزئية خاصة تصف بناءاتها التجريبية وتُنمّط أشكالها. وما دام التحليل والتركيب – كإجراءين تجريبيين – هما عمادا البحث الكيميائي وجوهره، فمن الضروري أن تحوي لغة الكيمياء تمثيلات صورية توصف بدورها بأنها صيغٌ أو عبارات تحليلية وتركيبية. يمكننا إذن الزعم بأن ثمة علاقة اعتماد متبادلة بين لغة الكيمياء وممارساتها المعملية؛ فاللغة تؤثر مباشرة (...) – وبأكثر من طريقة – على مجرى البحث الكيميائي وتطوره, ومن خلالها يمكن تحديد مدى قوته أو ضعفه ... تقدمه أو تخلفه ... شرعية تنبؤاته أو افتقادها لسمة الشرعية المنطقية؛ كما أن سُبل البحث المعملي للكيمياء تنعكس بالضرورة على قواعد الصياغة الصورية لهذه اللغة ومدى إمكانية تطويرها وتنقيتها من شوائب اللغة العادية التي اشتُقت منها. ويعني ذلك – بعبارة أخرى – أن اللغة والتجريب شقان مُكملان لبعضهما البعض؛ وجهان لعملة واحدة تحمل اسم الممارسة العلمية. فهل تختلف اللغة الكيميائية عن غيرها من لغات العلم الخاصة؟ وكيف يستخدم الكيميائيون لغتهم؟ ما هي القواعد الحاكمة لهذه اللغة؟, وما هي نتائج استخدامها بالنسبة للكيمياء ككل؟. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of consciousness aims to investigate and explain our thinking about phenomenally conscious states. Based on empirical studies, researchers have argued (a) that we lack a folk concept of consciousness, (b) that we do not think entities like Microsoft feel regret, (c) that unfelt pains are widely accepted, and (d) that people do not attribute phenomenally conscious states to duplicated hamsters. In this article, I review these and other intriguing claims about people’s understanding of phenomenal consciousness. In (...) doing so, I also show why experimental philosophy of consciousness is challenging, although perhaps not quite as daunting as studying phenomenal consciousness itself. (shrink)

In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic (...) epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

While experimental philosophy has fruitfully applied the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science to debates within epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, relatively little work has been done within philosophy of religion. And this isn’t due to a lack of need! Philosophers of religion frequently rely on empirical claims that can be either verified or disproven, but without exploring whether they are. And philosophers of religion frequently appeal to intuitions which may vary wildly according to education level, (...) theological background, etc., without concern for whether or not the psychological mechanisms that underwrite those intuitions are broadly shared or reliable. In this chapter, I explore some of the fruit and possibilities for the emerging field of experimental philosophy of religion. First, in Section 1, I will elucidate some of the historical grounding for experimental philosophy of religion. Then in Section 2, I briefly consider how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to a seminal topic within philosophy of religion, namely, the problem of evil. In Section 3, we’ll sketch some broader applications of experimental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Metaethics is the study of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, insofar as they relate to the subject matter of moral or, more broadly, normative discourse – the subject matter of what is good, bad, right or wrong, just, reasonable, rational, what we must or ought to do, or otherwise. But out of these four ‘core’ areas of philosophy, it is plausibly the philosophy of language that is most central (...) to metaethics – and not simply because ‘metaethics’ was for a long time construed more narrowly as a name for the study of moral language. The philosophy of language is central to metaethics because both the advantages of and the open problems facing different metaethical theories differ sharply over the answers those theories give to central questions in the philosophy of language. In fact, among the open problems over which such theories differ, are included particularly further problems in the philosophy of language. This article briefly surveys a range of broad categories of views in metaethics and both catalogues some of the principal issues faced by each in the philosophy of language, as well as how those arise out of their answers to more basic questions in the philosophy of language. I make no claim to completeness, only to raising a variety of important issues. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on (...) the basis of his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

Are emotions bodily feelings or evaluative cognitions? What is happiness, pain, or “being moved”? Are there basic emotions? In this chapter, I review extant empirical work concerning these and related questions in the philosophy of emotion. This will include both (1) studies investigating people’s emotional experiences and (2) studies investigating people’s use of emotion concepts in hypothetical cases. Overall, this review will show the potential of using empirical research methods to inform philosophical questions regarding emotion.

While Classical Logic (CL) used to be the gold standard for evaluating the rationality of human reasoning, certain non-theorems of CL—like Aristotle’s and Boethius’ theses—appear intuitively rational and plausible. Connexive logics have been developed to capture the underlying intuition that conditionals whose antecedents contradict their consequents, should be false. We present results of two experiments (total n = 72), the first to investigate connexive principles and related formulae systematically. Our data suggest that connexive logics provide more plausible rationality frameworks for (...) human reasoning compared to CL. Moreover, we experimentally investigate two approaches for validating connexive principles within the framework of coherence-based probability logic (Pfeifer & Sanfilippo, 2021). Overall, we observed good agreement between our predictions and the data, but especially for Approach 2. (shrink)

A typical device in film is to have a character narrating what is going on, but this narration is not always a reliable guide to the events. According to Maier, distortions may be caused by the narrator’s intent, naivety, use of drugs, and/or cognitive disorder/illness. What is common to these various causes, he argues, is the presence of a point of view, which appears in a movie as shots. While this perspective-based account of unreliability covers most cases, I unpack its (...) methodological consequences and gesture at a possibility that Maier’s analysis overlooks. A narration, I suggest, can be unreliable simply because it is ill-timed with the events shown on screen. In such a case, the distortion is not due to any character’s point of view; rather, it comes from the film medium’s ability to divorce what is seen and what is heard. As a consequence of this mismatch, it is possible to have a reliable narrator but an unreliable narration. Since voice and context of utterance usually match in ordinary speech, I conclude that philosophy of language may be ill-suited to properly understand this particular phenomenon. (shrink)

How language works — its functions, mechanisms, and limitations — matters to the early moderns as much as it does to contemporary philosophers. Many of the moderns make reflection on language central to their philosophical projects, both as a tool for explaining human cognition and as a weapon to be used against competing views. Even in philosophers for whom language is less central, we can find important connections between their views on language and their other philosophical (...) commitments. (shrink)

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom’s nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application (...) of Brandom’s theory has important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified. (shrink)

This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may miss what (...) is most powerful and pernicious in the speech of political culture. This essay is a call to start paying attention to these more covert speech acts, and a first attempt at beginning to theorize them. It argues that dogwhistles present a complex and interesting case for the philosopher of language, and explores their implications for democratic politics. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present (...) the first empirical study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's (...) sources of evidence, but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

In this chapter we explain what experimental philosophy of science is, how it relates to the philosophy of science, and STS more broadly, and what sorts of contributions is can make to ongoing research in the philosophy of science.

In this chapter, I try to answer the above question, and another question that it presupposes: can philosophy of language help us navigate the political news cycle? A reader can be sceptical of a positive answer to the latter question; after all, citizens, political theorists, and journalists seem to be capable of following current politics and its coverage in the news, and there is no reason to think that philosophy of language in particular should be capable (...) of helping people make sense and respond to the news. I will illustrate the application of philosophy of language to three contrasting strategies of political propaganda: dogwhistles, meaning perversions, and bald-faced lies. I hope that these help us see that philosophy of language can be a good tool in diagnosing demagoguery, and in resisting it. (shrink)

Objective The relations between thought and reality are studied in many fields of philosophy and science. Examples include ontology and metaphysics in general, linguistics, neuroscience and even mathematics. Each one has its postulates, its language, its methods and its own constraints. It would be unreasonable, however, for them to ignore each other. In the pages that follow we will try to identify areas of proximity between the ideas of contemporary philosophers of language and those issued mainly by (...) Ontology of Knowledge but also by mathematics and neuroscience. We will try to take advantage of the clarity and the perfect structuring of the lecture « La philosophie contemporaine du langage » (the contemporary philosophy of language) given by Professor Denis Vernant . We will make use of this lecture, both for the ideas presented and as a reference process. The goal of this article is to bring out, through a benevolent confrontation, new ideas for the benefit of knowledge in general. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). (...) In this chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

A belief in a firm correspondence between objects, ideas, and their representation in language pervaded the works of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

(1727–1781) in 1750. This conviction is particularly manifest in Turgot’s sharp critique of Berkeley’s philosophical system and his remarks on Maupertuis’s reconstruction of the origin of language. During the 1750s Turgot’s epistemological views underwent a change, apparent in two of his contributions to the Encyclopédie: the entries Existence and Étymologie (1756). These articles included a reassessment of Berkeleyan (...) immaterialism, facing an ultimate crisis of definition and representation. A similar development may be traced in contemporary works by Condillac and Diderot. Turgot’s Encyclopédie entries also envisaged a new science, an archeology of the human mind aided by the examination of linguistic development and change. This entailed the scientific verification of conjectures in any historical account of ideas, turning etymological

and psychological inquiries into what Turgot termed ‘experimental metaphysics’. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show (...) that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune (...) to the main objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

The Philosophy ofLanguage belongs to the foundations of philosophical reflexion. In this volume, its central problems and strategies are explained, and the nature of sentences and other elements of language are analysed. The didactical exposition of the most important schools and thinkers makes the volume particularly interesting for readers new to the subject.

Moderate scientism is the view that empirical science can help answer questions in nonscientific disciplines. In this paper, we evaluate moderate scientism in philosophy. We review several ways that science has contributed to research in epistemology, action theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. We also review several ways that science has contributed to our understanding of how philosophers make judgments and decisions. Based on this research, we conclude that the case for moderate philosophical (...) scientism is strong: scientific practice has promoted significant progress in philosophy and its further development should be welcomed and encouraged. (shrink)

Philosophy of Language, introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author Salah Ismail divided the book into seven chapters. Ch. I, Philosophy of language: Defining term and Indication of trends. Ch.2, Empirical theory in language learning (Quine). Ch.3, Mental theory in language learning and its knowledge (Chomsky). Ch.4, Theories of meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various (...) advantages and liabilities; theory of ideas, theory of verification, use theory. Ch.5, Theory of communication- intention. Ch.6, Pragmatics and rules of conversation. Ch.7, Language, truth and reality. يعالج الكتاب الموضوعات الأساسية في فلسفة اللغة وهي المعنى والإشارة والصدق، بالإضافة إلى تعلم اللغة ومعرفتها. ويعرض بأسلوب رصين وبدقة نظريات الفلاسفة المعاصرين في هذه الموضوعات بداية من فتجنشتين، ومرورا بكواين وتشومسكي وجرايس، إلى جون سيرل في وقتنا الحالي. وستجد فيه إجابات عن أسئلة من قبيل: كيف نتعلم اللغة؟ وما المعنى؟ وكيف تعني الكلمات ما تعنيه؟ وما شروط صدق الجملة؟ وما الاختلاف بين معنى الجملة والمعنى لدى المتكلم؟ وكيف يكون التواصل اللغوي ممكنا؟ وما قواعد المحادثة؟ وما الاختلاف بين علم الدلالة وعلم الاستعمال؟ ويدافع المؤلف عن نظرية الاستعمال في المعنى . (shrink)

An investigation of Frege’s various contributions to the study of language, focusing on three of his most famous doctrines: that concepts are unsaturated, that sentences refer to truth-values, and that sense must be distinguished from reference.