Episode 6: Jesse Prinz discusses experimental philosophy
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What is experimental philosophy and how does it differ from traditional arm‑chair methods?
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Mark Hopwood.
With us today is Jesse Prince, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and he's here to talk to us about experimental philosophy. Jesse Prince, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. So I guess the obvious question to begin with is, what is experimental philosophy?
At the most general level, experimental philosophy is intended to be continuous with philosophy as it's always been understood, which is an inquiry into some of the most profound and often conceptual questions that human beings have been able to devise. And traditionally, philosophy has posed questions but answered them using methods that are very different from the sciences. characteristically, reflection from an armchair. That is, you reason about a problem until you arrive at a solution, a little bit like mathematics, maybe. But experimental philosophy recognizes that the questions that philosophers have traditionally posed are also ones that could be investigated using methods that emerged in the millennia since
the birth of philosophy, including the methods of the sciences, and in particular the social sciences and the science of psychology have emerged at the forefront of new methods available for answering traditionally philosophical questions.
So maybe we could begin with an example of, let's say, a traditional philosophical problem and talk about both the more traditional way of tackling that problem and this new method of tackling it, using the new methods of psychology and the social sciences.
One example might be free will, which has dogged philosophers for a very long time. And I think the standard view, if it had to be characterized within philosophy... is that we should try and find a way to recognize that behavior is in a certain way caused, while also finding some place for freedom. And within that framework, which sounds a bit paradoxical at first, the view that has emerged in philosophy is called compatibilism. It says people are simultaneously free and determined. Now, to make that seemingly contradictory statement work, what you need to do is look at all of the determined actions that human beings participate in and identify some subset which can be privileged with the honorific label free.
Of the determined actions, these are the privileged ones that we consider actions for which people can be held responsible or accountable or credited, praised, and also blamed. The way philosophers argue for compatibilism is typically to pump intuitions, that is to try and get listeners to recognize that if you consider what we mean by the concept of freedom, it is actually compatible with our concept of also being externally or sometimes internally caused. Now, that claim, the claim that freedom and determinism are conceptually compatible, is one that exploits the audience's willingness to participate in philosophical reflection of a certain kind. The standard method would be to generate something like a thought experiment, a hypothetical scenario, where once described, people would willingly come on board and say, yes, I guess that really is a case of freedom, even though we presuppose that the actions have been in some way caused.
What experimental philosophers try and do is test whether those intuitions are really robust, whether they're shared, and whether they arise consistently across a range of different thought experiments. where philosophers are inclined to give answers based on their own theoretical backgrounds, the experiments in experimental philosophy, the thought experiments they use, which are culled from traditional philosophy, are given to ordinary, untrained lay folk who don't necessarily have any philosophical predilections or prior theoretical commitments. What the experimentalists have found is that small variations in classic philosophical thought experiments can elicit entirely different intuitions.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is experimental philosophy and how does it differ from traditional arm‑chair methods?
0:03–6:49
2
How does experimental philosophy test the classic free‑will problem with thought‑experiment surveys?
6:49–10:39
3
What do studies of intuition variation reveal about compatibilism versus incompatibilism?
10:39–15:47
4
How can small changes in a thought experiment flip people’s judgments about responsibility?
15:47–21:42
5
What role do cultural differences play in moral intuitions about utilitarian dilemmas?
21:42–27:44
6
How does experimental philosophy relate to Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of philosophical intuitions?
27:44–32:13
7
What methodological debates arise when philosophers adopt scientific experimental techniques?
32:13–35:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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