Should we descry the nature of the self from thought experiments? Shaun Nichols says ‘maybe,’ but only if we use thought experiments that do not recruit the indexical “I” (non-I-recruiting). His reason is that the psychology of “I” perforce mandates that imagination responds to thought experiments that recruit it (I-recruiting) peculiarly. Here, I consider whether he is correct about non-I-recruiting personal identity thought experiments. I argue positively using the same framework, i.e., considering the underlying psychology.

Conceptual analysis aims to uncover the basic criteria of concepts that underwrite categorizing members via the method of cases. However, conceptual analysis has not been very successful and experimental philosophy has increasingly detailed this lack of success. This essay reviews Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy by Michael Strevens, which attempts a novel defence of conceptual analysis. It is a strategic intervention that seems to preserve a relatively traditional picture of philosophical inquiry. I concentrate on several (...) assumptions in this intervention that might be questioned and conclude there are good reasons to continue an interrogation of how we understand the philosophical enterprise. Ideally, this might encourage us to rebuild our picture of what philosophy is. (shrink)

I review recent empirical findings on knowledge attributions in lottery cases and report a new experiment that advances our understanding of the topic. The main novel finding is that people deny knowledge in lottery cases because of an underlying qualitative difference in how they process probabilistic information. “Outside” information is generic and pertains to a base rate within a population. “Inside” information is specific and pertains to a particular item’s propensity. When an agent receives information that 99% of all lottery (...) tickets lose (outside information), people judge that she does not know that her ticket will lose. By contrast, when an agent receives information that her specific ticket is 99% likely to lose (inside information), people judge that she knows that her ticket will lose. Despite this difference in knowledge judgments, people rate the likelihood of her ticket losing the exact same in both cases (i.e. 99%). The results shed light on other factors affecting knowledge judgments in lottery cases, including formulaic expression and participants’ own estimation of whether it is true that the ticket will lose. The results also undermine previous hypotheses offered for knowledge denial in lottery cases, including the hypotheses that people deny knowledge because they either deny justification or acknowledge a chance for error. (shrink)

I review recent work from armchair and cross-cultural epistemology on whether humans possess a knowledge concept as part of a universal “folk epistemology.” The work from armchair epistemology fails because it mischaracterizes ordinary knowledge judgments. The work from cross-cultural epistemology provides some defeasible evidence for a universal folk epistemology. I argue that recent findings from comparative psychology establish that humans possess a species-typical knowledge concept. More specifically, recent work shows that knowledge attributions are a central part of primate social cognition, (...) used to predict others’ behavior and guide decision-making. The core primate knowledge concept is that of truth detection (across different sensory modalities) and retention (through memory) and may also include rudimentary forms of indirect truth discovery through inference. In virtue of their evolutionary heritage, humans inherited the primate social-cognitive system and thus share this core knowledge concept. (shrink)

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This result undermines (...) some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

Some experimental philosophers imply that philosophers should endorse folk intuitions and even use them to advance philosophical theses. In this paper I will try to contrast experimental appeals to intuition with J. L. Austin’s, whom some experimentalists cite as a precursor of their method. I will suggest that Austin evokes ordinary intuitions in order to dismantle philosophical quests. He even suggests (a) that the appeal to ordinary intuitions of the folk can hardly prescribe answers to extraordinary circumstances and (b) that (...) philosophical quests themselves are extraordinary. Therefore, the appeal to folk intuitions cannot prescribe answers to philosophical problems. It can only dissolve philosophical quests; yet, the dismantling of philosophy hardly accords with the experimentalists’ agenda. (shrink)

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)

In this entry, we provide an overview of some of the methodological debates surrounding contextualism and consider whether they are, in effect, based on an underlying methodological dispute. We consider three modes of motivation of epistemic contextualism including i) the method of cases, ii) the appeal to linguistic analogies and iii) the appeal to conceptual analogies and functional roles. We also consider the methodological debates about contextualism arising from experimental philosophy. We conclude that i) there is no distinctive methodological doctrine (...) or set of methodological doctrines that is centrally invoked by all epistemic contextualists and ii) the substantive dispute about the truth of contextualism very frequently, although not invariably, reflects an underlying methodological dispute. (shrink)

Wie ist es wohl, eine Fledermaus zu sein? Wäre ein rein physikalisches Duplikat von mir nur ein empfindungsloser Zombie? Muss man sich seinem Schicksal ergeben, wenn man sich unfreiwillig als lebensnotwendige Blutwaschanlage eines weltberühmten Violinisten wieder findet? Kann man sich wünschen, der König von China zu sein? Bin ich vielleicht nur ein Gehirn in einem Tank mit Nährflüssigkeit, das die Welt von einer Computersimulation vorgegaukelt bekommt? Worauf beziehen sich die Menschen auf der Zwillingserde mit ihrem Wort 'Wasser', wenn es bei (...) ihnen gar kein H2O gibt? -/- Diese und weitere seltsame Fragen sind das tägliche Brot vieler professioneller Philosophen. Die abstrusen Umstände, die dabei geschildert werden, nennt man "Gedankenexperimente". -/- Was soll die Erörterung dieser Szenarien, die sich so weit von unserem alltäglichen Leben, z.T. außerhalb der Grenzen unserer Wirklichkeit abspielen? Welche Rolle spielen diese "Gedankenexperimente" in der philosophischen Methodologie? Ist diese Rolle überhaupt berechtigt? -/- Das vorliegende Buch gibt Antworten auf diese Fragen. Es stellt sich heraus, dass diese seltsamen Gedankenexperimente nicht nur berechtigte, sondern überaus wichtige Instrumente philosophischen Forschens darstellen. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits has been highly influential since the beginning of this century. It can be read as a systematic response to scepticism. One of the most important notions in this response is the notion of «evidence,» which will be the focus of the present paper. I attempt to show primarily two things. First, the notion of evidence invoked by Williamson does not address the sceptical worry: he stipulates an objective notion of evidence, but this begs the (...) question against his opponent. Second, his related thesis «Evidence equals Knowledge» does not sit well with his own content externalism: he promises to relate epistemology to philosophy of mind, but he fails to live up to this commitment in his crucial chapter on scepticism. Other minor problems concerning evidence will also be discussed in due course. (shrink)

J’argumente que les Quiniens qui sont sceptiques par rapport à la distinction analytique/synthétique devraient aussi être sceptiques quant à la distinction entre conflits verbaux et factuels. Je développe une objection à la distinction entre conflits verbaux et factuels, dérivée des objections à la distinction analytique/synthétique. J’explique ensuite de quoi se compose le scepticisme qui en résulte. En définitive, ces sceptiques devraient reconnaître la différence entre conflits verbaux et factuels, mais pensent que certaines tâches philosophiques ne peuvent être performées.

The paper addresses the question of the nature and limits of philosophical thought experiments. On the one hand, experimental philosophers are right to claim that we need much more laboratory work in order to have more reliable thought experiments, but on the other hand a naturalism that is too radical is incapable of clarifying the peculiarity of thought experiments in philosophy. Starting from a historico-critical reconstruction of Kant’s concept of the “experiments of pure reason”, this paper outlines an account of (...) thought experiments in philosophy that tries to reconcile the thesis of a principled difference between scientific and philosophical TEs with the position of a methodological naturalism that does not admit any difference in kind between the methods of science and of philosophy. (shrink)

The idea of the present Issue originated in a workshop held at the University of Urbino, Italy, in June 2014, and subsequently developed into an independent editorial project by including contributions that were not initially presented at the workshop. The eight essays that follow authored by young and emerging philosophers as well as fully accomplished ones—touch upon various aspects of the most recent debate surrounding TEs, closely engaging with many influential proposals that have been put forward over the last few (...) years. They can be organised around three main areas of concern. The first group deals with general issues raised by the use of TEs, such as the possibility of drawing a principled distinction between scientific and philosophical TEs (Marco Buzzoni), the role played by intuitions within philosophical TEs (Julia Langkau), and the different ways in which the intended conclusion of a TE can be resisted (Roy Sorensen). The second group focuses on the logical form of philosophical TEs (Sören Häggqvist; Daniele Sgaravatti), and on the kind of access to modal knowledge they are standardly taken to provide (Vittorio Morato). The third and last group explores the virtues and limits of TEs used in two specific philosophical areas, namely the philosophy of science (Margherita Benzi), and the philosophy of mind (Elizabeth Schier). (shrink)

n the analytic tradition, the appeal to intuition has been a common philosophical practice that supposedly provides us with epistemic standards. The authoress argues that the high epistemological standards of traditional analytic philosophy cannot be pursued by this method. Perhaps within a naturalistic, reliable frame intuitions can be evoked more coherently. Philosophers can use intuition as scientists do, in hypothesis- construction or data- collection. This is an ironic conclusion: Traditional analytic epistemologists rely on the appeal to intuition, but cannot justify (...) it. Naturalists, on the other hand, are not those who need such a method; yet they can better accommodate it within their view. (shrink)

According to Joshua Alexander, philosophers use intuitions routinely as a form of evidence to test philosophical theories but experimental philosophy demonstrates that these intuitions are unreliable and unrepresentative.1 According to Herman Cappelen, philosophers never use intuitions as evidence (despite the vacuous sentential leader ‘intuitively’) and experimental philosophy lacks a rationale for its much-touted existence.2 That two books are diametrically opposed on methodology in philosophy is not noteworthy. But eyebrows might be raised at such contradictory accounts of the phenomenology of philosophical (...) inquiry. What is it that (analytic) philosophers do? Why is it so difficult to achieve consensus on the professional activities in which we engage? (shrink)

The question is whether Urmson's account depicts Austin's method needs a qualified answer. Roughly, the answer is that what it presents is not Austin's method because it is not the whole of Austin's method. Urmson confines his attention to aspects of the inner structure of the method and leaves out the question of its motivation and possible aims.