In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.

The subject of the study is the concepts of "metaphilosophy" in the works of several modern domestic and foreign scientists-metaphilosophists. The relevance of the article is due to the presence of a variety of metaphilosophical concepts, which, pursuing one common goal – to understand and explain what philosophy is, come to different and often contradictory conclusions. The article aims to compare the metaphilosophical concepts of domestic and foreign authors (T. I. Oizerman, M. K. Mamardashvili, J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, T. (...) Williamson and N. Rescher) according to certain criteria. Within the framework of the task, it is proposed to identify the essential characteristics of the concept of "philosophy" of the listed authors and to propose a variant of the typology of modern concepts of metaphilosophy. The article uses the method of comparative analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the author, analyzing the existing typologies of metaphilosophical concepts (on a conceptual and methodological basis), offers a third variant of the typology in relation to the possibility of progress in philosophy and its prospects. The author draws attention to the fact that the understanding of metaphilosophy in the concepts of the scientists under consideration (Oiserman, Williamson, Rescher, Deleuze and Guattari) reveals interesting parallels and collisions. The author comes to the conclusion that in order to better understand the nature of metaphilosophy, it is necessary to identify the essential characteristics of the concept of metaphilosophy in the concepts of different scientists. The picture of metaphilosophy turns out to be diverse and contradictory, because according to the authors considered, metaphilosophy is "cabinet"; - pluralistic; - "aporic"; - self-reflexive; - dialectical; - is in constant development; - guided by the principles of pragmatism and efficiency; - able to give satisfactory answers to current questions; - is not absolutely rational, but contains an element of intuition. (shrink)

There are two ways of approaching an ontological debate: ontological realism recommends that metaphysicians seek to discover deep ontological facts of the matter, while ontological anti-realism denies that there are such facts; both views sometimes run into difficulties. This paper suggests an approach to ontology that begins with conceptual analysis and takes the results of that analysis as a guide for which metaontological view to hold. It is argued that in some cases, the functions for which we employ a part (...) of our conceptual scheme might give us reasons to posit ontological facts regarding certain objects. The proposed approach recommends ontological realism about an object just in case our conceptual scheme gives us reason to. This yields a mixed overall metaontological view that adopts ontological realism to some issues and ontological anti-realism to others, and that avoids the difficulties that typically arise for the two views. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to trace the origin of the systematic cross-cultural variations in referential intuitions by investigating the effects of perspective taking on people’s responses in the Gödel-style probes through two novel experiments. Here is how we will proceed. In section 2, we first briefly introduce the MMNS (2004) study, and then critically review the two relevant studies conducted by Sytsma and colleagues (i.e., Sytsma and Livengood 2011; Sytsma et al. 2015). In section 3, we introduce the literature (...) on cross-cultural variation in perspective taking in cultural psychology, which together with the conjecture of perspectival ambiguity leads to the hypothesis of our current study. In sections 4 and 5, two new experiments on how perspective taking affects people’s responses in hypothetical stories modelled on the Gödel thought experiment will be reported. Based on the empirical findings, in section 6 we argue that the robust cross-cultural variations thus far observed in people’s responses to the Gödel cases are largely attributable to culturally specific perspective-taking strategies, which provides new support for the proposal previously made by Sytsma and Livengood (2011). The implications of the experimental results for the ongoing work of testing the theories of refence of names and for the current metaphilosophical debate on the robustness of philosopher’s intuitions are also drawn in this section. Finally, the major conclusions and contributions of the current study are highlighted in section 7. (shrink)