Experimental philosophers, it’s time to stop calling ourselves analytic philosophers

A few years ago I saw a friend give an experimental philosophy talk at a departmental seminar. During the Q&A, someone in the audience asked the question all of us in experimental philosophy have learned to dread: “But is this actually philosophy? Seems to me you are just doing psychology.” My friend did their best to respond to it, but they noticeably struggled to address the concern. At the post-talk reception, I introduced myself to the audience member as a metaphilosopher and asked them to say a bit more about why they thought it wasn’t philosophy. The audience member didn’t have an answer. I don’t mean that they gave a bad reason. I mean they literally shrugged their shoulders and mumbled something non-committal.

This style of objection – that experimental philosophy is not philosophy because philosophy is interested in truth, not people’s beliefs / conceptions / intuitions / psychology / etc. – appeared all over the metaphilosophy literature back during what we might call the “xphi wars” of the 2000s and 2010s. The xphi wars have more or less ended, with the metaphilosophical literature of experimental philosophy slowing down substantially. That said, even though the fighting ended, neither side won. While no one is publishing the claim that experimental philosophy is not philosophy or a nearly pointless way of doing philosophy, the sentiment is certainly still in the hearts and minds of many of our colleagues.

While we experimental philosophers haven’t done this to ourselves, we absolutely haven’t made our lives any easier. We have all been answering The Question wrong. Instead of trying to appease the audience member, we should reject the premise of their question. Of course we are doing philosophy. We are just not doing philosophy in their way. Not in the analytic way.

Towards a Post-Analytic Philosophy

Let me start off my argument with what I take to be my least controversial claim: Over the last few decades there has been a fair bit of hunger in academic philosophy for post-analytic philosophy. This hunger has at least two sources.

First, there is a sense that what have become the core analytic projects – e.g., conceptual analysis of key terms – have shown themselves to be futile or not worth pursuing. A half-century of Gettierology and Trolleyology have only produced more and more sophisticated epicycles. In these literatures, there are true believers who remain optimistic of a breakthrough or see the epicycles as a feature rather than a bug, but there is a solid contingent of academic philosophers who are thoroughly disillusioned with this lack of progress. These are people who see the increasing conceptual and theoretical complexity in the answering what are often incredibly small and parochial questions as a sign that something has gone off the rails.

Second, analytic philosophy has imperialist tendencies. If a philosophy department is analytic, chances are it is only analytic. In other words, if university with an analytic philosophy department has Foucault or Derrida scholars, they are not in the philosophy department. They are instead out of reach of the philosophy department’s hiring committees in literature, anthropology, or modern languages departments. The cause of this is pretty straightforward. Part of the (for lack of a better term) ideology of analytic philosophy is that analytic philosophy is the only proper way of doing philosophy. Never mind that analytic philosophers in 2026 are asking completely different questions and using vastly methods than Frege, Russell, or Carnap were. According to analytic philosophy, the questions analytic philosophy asks and the way analytic philosophy asks them are the only way of doing philosophy. Everything else is, at best, psychology, literature, anthropology, or linguistics, and at worst, unrigorous nonsense.

This exclusionary attitude hasn’t stopped professional philosophers from trying to forge a different, non-analytic path. An admirable few have taught themselves continental, eastern, African, indigenous, or Islamic philosophy. But more collectively, academic philosophy has seen a rise of what my old colleague Clotilde Torregrossa (2024) calls alternative methodologies. These include, but are not limited to: the applied turn; corners drawing more explicitly from continental philosophy, such as feminist philosophy; conceptual engineering; and yes, experimental philosophy.

The Experimental Philosopher’s Bind

Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time talking to (mostly European) experimental philosophers about how they see themselves in the field. I really can’t help myself. I am fascinated by the anthropology of the field and my dissertation drew inspiration from Kuhn by taking the sociology and anthropology of philosophy to be a key part of any metaphilosophical discussion. Moreover, these sort of discussions are probably also inevitable consequences of a consequence between members of the same out-group, but let’s set that aside.

Basically every early-career and contingently-employed experimental philosopher I’ve spoken to has reported experiencing the same professional bind. They love doing experimental philosophy. They see it as philosophy. But they know a lot of philosophers don’t see it as real philosophy. Making matters worse, a lot of those people who don’t see experimental philosophy as real philosophy are on hiring committees or grant committees. The people who hold the key to experimental philosopher’s career do not see their scholarship as legitimate. This leaves the experimental philosopher with a couple of choices.

They could write armchair scholarship. This is scholarship that often does not address their own philosophical interests and runs counter to their beliefs in what philosophy is or should be. In a word, it is philosophy inauthentic to themselves. I can’t say how common this is, although after publishing almost exclusively experimental papers over the last few years, I have found myself thinking that I need to write more armchair papers for career purposes, and there are specific papers by others I know have been written for this reason. But this option isn’t available to everyone. Experimental philosophy has been around in its contemporary form for a quarter of a century, and many experimental philosophers are now “native” to it. They came up in grad school doing experimental philosophy, and consequently are early or mid-career philosophers who do not know how to write journal-quality armchair analytic philosophy papers.

Another unattractive option is to roll the dice that the hiring committee or grant body is made up of a critical mass of people sympathetic to experimental philosophy. Considering how few senior, securely-employed experimental philosophers there are (at least in Europe) I cannot state emphatically enough to outsiders how unbelievably low the odds of this working look to us in experimental philosophy.

That leaves us with the most common option, dressing up experimental scholarship up as relevant to armchair analytic philosophy. Every experimental philosopher has tons of practice doing this. It is how we answer The Question in Q&As. It is how we write grant applications. It is how we pitch ourselves in cover letters for jobs: “Oh sure, if you hire me, I will be conducting empirical research, but actually this is super important to existing debates in philosophy because x, y, and z”. This is the strategy experimental philosophers advise each other to use. It is the strategy I advise others to use.

This sort of appeasement is, by and large, what we see in the academic literature on experimental philosophy. Arguments for experimental philosophy, whether friendly or unfriendly for the armchair, have, in one way or another, positioned themselves as being in service of academic philosophy’s status quo. The stated goal is always improvement upon existing questions and not the creation of something fundamentally new.

Consider negative experimental philosophy. The tradition (which, despite its salience, is a very, very small minority of the community) often presents itself and is seen as explicitly hostile towards armchair philosophy. The armchair must be burned and may we be the people to burn it, etc., etc., Indeed, many of negative experimental philosophy’s practitioners and much of its support were from people who were attracted to it precisely because they were unhappy with analytic philosophy’s grip on the discipline. In practice, however, negative experimental philosophy’s scholarship always presents itself as being in service of analytic philosophy; negative experimental philosophy is a way to evaluate certain epistemic practices to improve existing philosophical projects. Take Machery’s “Philosophy within its proper bounds” (2017). It is deeply skeptical of the armchair, but lays out how to use experimental methods to improve our access to modal knowledge. If there is a more late-stage-analytic phrase, let alone stated goal, as modal knowledge, I cannot think of it. If Machery’s program succeeds, we might radically change how we do philosophy, but we will not radically change what sort of questions we ask or why we ask them. (There is so much more to be said about how negative xphi implicitly relies on analytic philosophy, but I’ll have to save that for another time).

What if we as experimental philosophers stopped playing this game? What if we pitched experimental philosophy as something historically connected with analytic philosophy but not metaphilosophically connected to it? As its own philosophy with its own methods and its own questions? As a tradition of philosophy as legitimate of an heir to Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, and Quine as analytic philosophy?

For a lot of us, this would certainly be more truthful than how we currently pitch our work. Experimental philosophy is by no means a unified field, but a lot of its members, myself among them, just do not care about or believe in the specific problems and specific questions analytic philosophy is working on. Sure, we can pitch our research as applying to those debates. God knows I could monologue off the cuff for an hour about why my experimental research actually matters to ongoing debates in analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, if we are being honest with ourselves, those problems aren’t what motivates us. They are little more than a gateway drug introducing us to other puzzles about, e.g., knowledge, morality, or the mind. We are now interested in our own things, and they are philosophy because they are deep, deep questions about ourselves and our reality.

What is experimental philosophy?

Let me manage expectations for this section. I’m not going to give an account of experimental philosophy as its own tradition of philosophy. It’s too heterogeneous of a tradition. It doesn’t simply carve between philosophers who run experiments and those who don’t. There are philosophers running experiments who are straightforwardly analytic philosophers who are running empirical studies that are still very much coming from an affinity to analytic philosophy. There are also experimental philosophers who don’t see themselves as philosophers at all (more on that below). Plus, one shouldn’t try to give necessary and sufficient conditions for sociocultural phenomena; we can’t give necessary and sufficient conditions for being punk (not that some philosophers won’t try). Nonetheless, when comparing experimental philosophy with the analytic status quo, its most salient features are its methodological naturalism and emphasis on process.

Part of the analytic ideology of what makes philosophy philosophy is a sort of methodological rationalism. Philosophy is about considering thought experiments, eliciting intuitions, considering reasons, and evaluating arguments. Philosophy is this way because, not only are these a way to conduct philosophical inquiry, they are seen to be the only real avenue to philosophical truth. Why that is is of course contested and not at all a settled matter, but these armchair methods somehow give us a way past our own psychology as thinkers to the philosophical facts that lie beyond. Experimental philosophy obviously rejects this, and this rejection, more than anything else, seems to be what gets analytic philosophers’ hackles up and leads them to brush experimental philosophy aside.

As far as I can tell, and this is largely anecdotal, there doesn’t seem to be one single thing motivating methodological naturalism in experimental philosophy. Some experimental philosophers seem to be frustrated with implicit and/or untested empirical claims in many philosophical arguments. This is the origin story I’ve heard first-hand for Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich (2001). The three of them were fed up with verdicts for thought experiments being defended with the proviso “everyone thinks that ___”, a move that appears, for example, when Thomson motivates the puzzle between the switch and footbridge variation of the trolley case (1985).

Other experimental philosophers seem to be some breed of metaphysical naturalist. They take the target or aim of philosophy to be continuous with nearby scientific disciplines and, as a consequence, scientific methods are the correct way to proceed. A variation on this, not necessarily driven by underlying commitments to metaphysical naturalism, are those who see philosophy as a handmaiden of the sciences and use experimental philosophy to help nearby disciplines. Finally and relatedly, there is also a healthy does of pragmatism in the community. These pragmatists take philosophy to not be after any sort of truth but rather as a therapeutic practice aimed at untangling mental knots or otherwise pushing our conceptions of ourselves and our world forward. For them, experiments are merely one appropriate tool among many to address philosophical problems.

Seting aside commitments to the proper methods of philosophy, experimental philosophy largely rejects analytic philosophy’s focus on content. While conceptual analysis takes up a sizable chunk of analytic philosophy, experimental philosophy instead focuses on a much wider array of questions, most of which focus on processes rather than content. This is a shift noticed back in 2008’s Experimental Philosophy Manifesto, with Knobe and Nichols writing, “As far as we know, no experimental philosopher has ever offered an analysis of one concept in terms of another. Instead, the aim is usually to provide an account of the factors that influence applications of a concept, and in particular, the internal psychological processes that underlie such applications.”

The shift from content to process is subtle. Consider the literature on the side-effect effect, the widely replicated finding that people’s judgements of one’s intentions depends on the morality of the act. As Knobe and Nichols anticipated two decades ago, as the literature has continued apace, it has almost never been used as evidence about the conceptual content of intention. The literature has instead mapped out the mechanisms behind the judgements, focusing on the process behind intentionality judgements, not the analysis of intentionality.

While the shift from content to processes marks a striking divergence from the analytic program, in it we can still find significant residue of the case method. In studying the side-effect effect, one is still using thought experiments to elicit judgements and then using the judgements to arrive at a theory about intentionality. Indeed, Knobe and Nichols, like Machery, present experimental philosophy as being in service of the case method. For Knobe and Nichols, experimental philosophy is a tool to help philosophers revisit cases and intuitions in a new light and to better ground existing projects in philosophy in the philosophical concerns of everyday people.

Nonetheless, as experimental philosophy has matured, its ties to the case method have grown weaker and weaker. We are now seeing experimental philosophy that never touch vignettes. These include corpus linguistics projects (Bordonaba-Plou 2025, Andow 2015, Reuter and Baumgartner 2024) or experimental studies aimed at testing myths about language change (Liao and Hansen 2023). We are also now seeing papers that use vignettes but for reasons other than studying people’s verdicts about some concept – such as projects studying how and why people change their mind about the vignettes (Horvath and Weigmann 2023, Landes et al. 2026).

As experimental philosophy matures and diverges from the sorts of debates it first emerged to address, we are seeing experimental philosophy becoming an independent philosophical tradition in its own right. A tradition interested in its own set of philosophical questions with its own view of how best to approach them. Consequently, experimental philosophers should celebrate and defend this against analytic philosophy’s more chauvinistic tendencies. We should be (and largely already are) proud that we are pushing the limits of what philosophy can be, shaking up stale literatures and challenging stale methodological assumptions. Why not take the extra step and openly embrace experimental philosophy is its own independent tradition?

Moving Forward

Embracing an independent tradition of experimental philosophy is not going to immediately solve the social pressures currently facing experimental philosophers. Writing in a job cover letter “I don’t do analytic philosophy, I do experimental philosophy” is only going to make one’s job prospects worse until the discipline becomes more accepting to alternative conceptions of philosophy.

In the interim, we can start moving the needle. Instead of answering hostile questions in Q&A’s through appeasement (“actually, this is relevant and important to existing work in philosophy because __ “), embrace the difference. Answer hostile questions by defending our legitimacy and independence. Respond with, “I’m interested in fundamental questions about [topic] and this is one of the best ways to proceed because ____”.

We should also support our allies in the fight for a more methodologically inclusive, more vibrant discipline of philosophy. As discussed above, there are other groups fighting for legitimacy within the discipline, with mixed results. These include conceptual engineers, feminist philosophers, pragmatists, applied philosophers, and others. We all have the common goal to be able to professionally engage in sort of philosophy we believe in. We also share a common roadblock, namely the insistence that we are doing philosophy poorly or not at all.

Ultimately, however, I suspect the best positioned to affect change are the colleagues who are securely employed. They have the advantage of not having to camouflage themselves as analytic philosophers in order to get their career off the ground. They have the cover and security to declare themselves as part of an independent philosophical tradition and pull the levers of the institution to secure that independence. Many already are taking helpful steps, developing the next generation of experimental philosophers by taking on PhD students or even creating independent degree programs in experimental philosophy. But it’s another step to openly claim and embrace experimental philosophy’s status as a distinct philosophical program.

But is Experimental Philosophy Actually Philosophy?

I’ll end by reflecting on the fact that a fair few experimental philosophers don’t see themselves as philosophers. They instead see themselves as cognitive scientists (a point made most explicitly by Knobe (2016)) or some third thing that is a legitimate research program but neither philosophy nor anything else.

The scholars I know who run in experimental philosophy circles but identify primarily as cognitive scientists aren’t particularly fussed by this sort of intra-philosophy boundary policing. Nor should they be, since many of them are in psychology or cognitive science departments. Their existence is not, however, evidence that experimental philosophy is actually cognitive science. When disciplinary boundaries meet, things tend to melt together and some of the research and researchers will inevitably end up drawing on one side of the fence more than the other. Accordingly, lots of work in the orbit of experimental philosophy is just cognitive science, but lots of it isn’t. Not only that, but a lot of the research that superficially looks like cognitive science is actually, under the hood, ultimately driven by philosophical inquiry.

Unlike the rest of us, cognitive-scientist-experimental-philosophers do not need to carve out a legitimate spot in academia because they generally have one in cognitive science and/or psychology. They are the only group for who appeasement to analytic philosophy may be appropriate. At least it is appropriate insofar as it serves to remind philosophers that philosophy has historically drawn on science and can fruitfully still draw on science. Nonetheless, they should ask themselves if explicitly shearing experimental philosophy out of philosophy is harming other experimental philosophers. Many of us in experimental philosophy have research interests that are not at home in, e.g., psychology departments (a fact I know from personal experience). Any campaign to further distance experimental philosophy from philosophy therefore risks making a lot of us even more homeless.

What about those who think experimental philosophy is neither experimental philosophy nor any other established discipline? Ultimately, disciplinary boundaries are created, not given. As long as disciplines have existed as a category, they have been subjected to fission and fusion. Take religious studies. The first religious studies department was founded in 1949. Obviously people were studying religion far before that, and not just in a theological sense. This research was nonetheless housed in different disciplines and accordingly seen as philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, and so on. This was changed, and it was changed intentionally. In the second half of the 20th century, scholars in positions in institutional authority drew together related research, helping construct the disciplinary boundary that exists today.

This is the future third way folk should be striving for. If they truly believe that their research program is legitimate but not philosophy, the surest way to convince others of this fact is to bend institutional structures to match. Indeed, it is worth asking if this is the right pathway forward for all of experimental philosophy. Some inspiration can be drawn from HPS (history and philosophy of science). Despite also being marginalized from the core analytic program, HPS has nonetheless established itself as a legitimate semi-independent discipline with dedicated HPS departments at Pittsburgh and Cambridge. but HPS scholars often (but not always) wind up in philosophy departments as philosophers of science.

Creating independent departments would certainly make many experimental philosophers’ lives better, but it would not solve the underlying problem: although things are improving, contemporary analytic philosophy still is too parochial, chauvinistic, and unimaginative about what philosophy could be. Experimental philosophy has, for all its existence, opposed these features of contemporary philosophy. Creating a walled garden for experimental philosophy will only serve to protect experimental philosophers. It will not help others who similarly chafe against the contemporary – and historically contingent – limits of the discipline. To help these others, we experimental philosophers need to make space in our colleagues’ minds for the legitimacy of philosophical projects other than the current analytic project. A good first step is responding to “But is this philosophy?” with “Yes, but not the kind you are used to.”