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Accentuate the Negative

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Abstract

Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we will take as our target philosophical intuitions as they are standardly conceived of in current practice. According to this conception, philosophical intuitions are propositional attitudes generated in response to hypothetical cases in philosophy which are “minimally foundational” (a person may appeal to them as evidence without having to provide evidence for them), non-inferential, and fallible. We also think that most of these arguments will go through mutatis mutandis for other conceptions of such judgments and their place in philosophical methodology (see, for example, Williamson 2004, 2005, 2007; Alexander and Weinberg 2007).

  2. The terms “negative” program and “positive” program are now in common use. We are unsure of their origin though they may have been introduced by Farid Masrour.

  3. For additional discussions of experimental philosophy’s positive and negative programs, see Alexander and Weinberg (2007); Kauppinen (2007); Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007); and Weinberg (2007).

  4. One notable exception is the recent work of Stotz and Griffiths (2004). They document the varying intuitions of specialist populations regarding the concept of the gene, and they have a good reason for restricting their populations of interest. Moreover, there are a number of interesting examples of experimental philosophy that do not particularly concern intuitions (see, e.g., Nichols 2002, Schwitzgebel in press), and that our arguments do not target.

  5. See Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007) for an earlier but different elucidation of forms of positive experimental philosophy.

  6. Perhaps some form of relativism or contextualism could be attempted. Different relativizations might have different degrees of plausibility (for example, see Glasgow 2008 on relativism and the concept of race). While such moves may be appropriate in some instances, we suspect that they will not prove generally attractive. For a discussion of why epistemic contextualism might not be particularly helpful, see Swain et al. 2008. For a discussion of relativizing intuitions about reference, see Mallon et al. 2009.

  7. See, e.g., Johnson (2008). Note though that lexical semanticists might offer some resources that philosophers would find useful if the factivity of “knows” or other epistemologically-interested verbs was under discussion.

  8. In addition to its original home in linguistics, the distinction has also done important work in other parts of cognitive science, e.g., in the developmental folk psychology literature (Surian and Leslie 1999; Bloom and German 2000; Scholl and Leslie 2003).

  9. It also presupposes at a minimum that it will be possible to decompose the relevant cognition into mechanisms with individually discernible functions. We note this commitment without taking issue with it here.

  10. To our knowledge, no one has explored “physical breakdown” as a candidate source of performance errors in positive experimental philosophy.

  11. We grant here, for the sake of discussion, that they have correctly characterized the way their experimental materials map into these distinctions.

  12. See Scholl (2007) for a positive example of using implicit measures in experiments in the philosophical domain of the metaphysics of objects.

  13. For further elaboration on this point, see Mallon (2007).

  14. Hauser et al. make this same move more explicitly when they exclude gender as a relevant explanatory dimension, writing that “we find it clear that some distinctions (e.g., the agent’s gender) do not carry any explanatory weight” (Hauser et al. 2007, p. 131). Here again, they make judgments that reflect a judgment about what sort of considerations are properly considered moral ones. But there seems little reason to think evolution would have respected such niceties in constructing us, so it is not clear why such exclusions are relevant to our underlying functional organization.

  15. Scholl provides some excellent suggestions as to how philosophers and psychologists could do a better job of getting a handle on the mechanisms underlying various intuitions. However, it is not clear how to use his suggestions to help with the deeper sorts of problems discussed here. For example, he writes, “understanding the origins of our metaphysical intuitions in various psychological mechanisms could help us understand when they are worth revising or forfeiting in our philosophical theories, especially if there is reason to think that those psychological mechanisms may yield unreliable results in the particular contexts in which they are being asked to operate” (Scholl 2007, p. 586). But without knowing the proper domain of those mechanisms, it stands as an open question just what will count as reliable or unreliable operation.

  16. Wittgenstein (1953), Part II, section xiv.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants in the 2008 Society for Philosophy and Psychology Workshop on Experimental Philosophy; the members of the Experimental Epistemology Laboratory (EEL) at Indiana University, especially Cameron Buckner and Chad Gonnerman; and two anonymous referees for this journal for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Siena College, 515 Loudon Road, Loudonville, NY, 12211, USA

    Joshua Alexander

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, 215 S. Central Campus Drive, Room 417 CTIHB, Salt Lake City, UT, 84112, USA

    Ronald Mallon

  3. Department of Philosophy, Indiana University, 1033 E. Third St., Sycamore Hall 011, Bloomington, IN, 47405-7005, USA

    Jonathan M. Weinberg

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  1. Joshua Alexander
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Correspondence to Joshua Alexander.

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Each author contributed equally to the project; authors are listed alphabetically

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Alexander, J., Mallon, R. & Weinberg, J.M. Accentuate the Negative. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 297–314 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-009-0015-2

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