'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

For twenty-five years experimental philosophy has been answering the same question: is this philosophy?

Ethan Landes, of Eindhoven University of Technology, proposes that it stop answering.

His argument, published on Daily Nous on 4 September, drew a long and unusually substantive comment thread — the kind of exchange that shows a discipline arguing about its own borders rather than about a thesis.

The argument#

Experimental philosophy — x-phi — does empirical work on the intuitions that philosophical arguments rest on. It runs surveys and experiments to find out what people actually judge about Gettier cases, free will, moral responsibility, reference, personal identity.

Landes's claim is about the rhetorical position the field has adopted. Experimental philosophers, he argues, spend their introductions appeasing: framing their results as contributions to debates that analytic philosophy was already having, justifying the survey by its bearing on a thesis in epistemology or the metaphysics of mind.

That framing concedes the terms. It accepts that the value of the empirical work is measured by its usefulness to an existing programme.

His proposal is to stop. In the sentence the discussion has taken up: We are doing philosophy. We are just not doing philosophy in their way.

The defence#

The supporters in the thread — among them Jonathan Lindauer, Joshua Knobe and Mark Alfano — make three points.

The first is institutional: the argument over legitimacy is already over, settled in practice by posts, journals and graduate programmes, whatever the theoretical objections. Continuing to argue it is a habit rather than a necessity.

The second is that x-phi asks the questions philosophy has always asked — about knowledge, about moral judgement, about what human beings take themselves to be doing when they attribute responsibility — and that the questions, not the instruments, are what make an inquiry philosophical.

Knobe's own work is the standing example: the finding that ordinary attributions of intentionality are sensitive to whether the outcome is good or bad is not a psychological curiosity but a result that any theory of action has to accommodate.

The objection#

The critics — Reichenbach, Rodriguez-Pereyra, Guerrero among them — press two lines.

The first is direct: asking a deep question is not sufficient. Theology asks deep questions. So does a great deal of social science. Method matters as much as subject matter, and a discipline that abandons the claim to a distinctive method has abandoned the claim to be a discipline.

The second is about the target. Landes's picture of analytic philosophy as conceptual analysis is, the critics say, a description of what analytic philosophy was taken to be in about 1960. Contemporary analytic philosophy is thoroughly entangled with the sciences — philosophy of physics, of biology, of mind, formal epistemology — and does not recognise itself in the caricature. Declaring independence from a straw opponent wins nothing.

That objection has force. It also cuts both ways: if analytic philosophy is already this methodologically plural, the demand that x-phi justify itself in its terms is harder to explain.

The practical worry#

A third group — Conner, Stephens — raises the argument nobody enjoys making.

Disciplines need boundaries because institutions do. Hiring lines are allocated to departments. Curricula have to be defended to deans. A subfield that publicly declares itself no longer part of analytic philosophy has, in the meeting where the departmental budget is decided, made an argument against its own funding.

This is not a philosophical objection and does not pretend to be. It is a description of the conditions under which philosophy is done — the conditions this site has been reporting on all summer, as philosophy departments close in Britain and technology companies hire the graduates.

What the argument is really about#

Underneath the exchange lies a question with no settled answer: what makes an inquiry philosophical?

Three candidates are in play, and each has costs.

The subject matter. Philosophy is whatever addresses the perennial questions. This admits x-phi immediately, and admits a great deal else besides — the objection the critics press.

The method. Philosophy is a priori argument. This is the cleanest criterion and the least true to practice: it would put much of the philosophy of physics, and most of naturalised epistemology, outside the discipline.

The tradition. Philosophy is what stands in a conversation running from Plato. This is honest about how disciplines actually work, and it is unfalsifiable, and it entrenches whoever currently holds the conversation.

Landes's proposal is best read as choosing the third and turning it: if tradition is what constitutes a discipline, then a new tradition can constitute a new one. The critics' reply is that traditions are not founded by announcement.

Why it matters beyond x-phi#

The same question is arriving from a different direction, and faster.

If a philosophical argument's value lies in the reasoning it contains, machine-produced reasoning has a claim on the discipline. If the value lies in a method that a human being is trained into, it does not. If the value lies in membership of a tradition, then the question becomes who is admitted, and by whom.

Philosophy has been able to leave that question open for a long time. It is going to be answered under pressure, and probably not by philosophers alone.