Yes it is philosophy

I wanted to respond to two themes that popped in criticism of my last post in the Daily Nous comment section: that I was being unfair to analytic philosophy and that regardless of what I might think, experimental philosophy is not philosophy.

I’ll start by defending my characterization of analytic philosophy, then argue that “this isn’t philosophy” is a philosophically unmotivated position to take towards experimental philosophy. There simply isn’t a good reason to think it, let alone say it.

Two Clarifications

The first post’s focus on the case method and conceptual analysis was one of narrative convenience and illustration. It’s what most of the relevant metaphilosophical literature is about, it’s what I know the most about, and it has played a huge role in the development of experimental philosophy. Any suggestion I made that it is anything more than one of the key contemporary analytic projects was a mistake on my part.

That said, I stand by the rest of my characterization of the less laudable features of analytic philosophy. I was (and will be, below) making general observations about the “core” areas of philosophy. They are not universal generalizations, and counterexamples will exist (yes, I know feminist philosophy exists, yes, I think it avoids many of the criticisms I raised, and yes, I think it is also plausibly a form of post-analytic philosophy). In addition, because my focus is on the discipline’s high-prestige “core”, my observations were and will be less and less apt as we move away from it.

Methodological Rationalism

With that out of the way, let’s turn to the main question: why does experimental philosophy earn the “this isn’t philosophy” treatment? I wish I had explained my view on this in better detail, as I think confusion about it motivated a number of critical comments. In the first post, I claimed that analytic philosophy is largely methodologically rationalist. This is the view that forms of inquiry that involve collecting data do not count as philosophy. Methodological rationalism is not meant to be a claim about what the targets of philosophy are or what sort of considerations should factor into philosophical practice. Rather it is a claim about what actions count as philosophy. Therefore, methodological rationalism is perfectly compatible with empirically-informed philosophy, and in fact this is a pretty standard combination of metaphilosophical commitments.

In practice, the methodological rationalism we see in analytic philosophy is not the strictest it can be. Some author-collected empirical data is actually quite welcome in the philosophy room. Subscribers to the standard form of methodological rationalism do not take issue when philosophers speculate about empirical facts or draw on their own contingent experiences to make a point.

What does fall outside of the scope of the version of methodological rationalism popular within the discipline is any sort of formal research method that goes out and collects empirical facts. Once one runs an experiment, conducts an ethnographic interview, or analyzes a corpus of linguistic data, one has exposed themselves to the charge that what they are doing is not philosophy. Collecting facts insofar as I notice trends around me is fine - if anything anecdotal evidence makes good grist for the mill for seminar Q&As - but collecting facts in an organized way is not.

Areas like feminist philosophy and philosophy of mind do rely on lots of empirical work, formal and otherwise. But in most of these cases, the formal empirical work is not done by philosophers. Even dyed-in-the-wool proponents of scientism who take categories like morality or knowledge to be revealed to us by science traditionally have not done the science themselves. For one reason or another, that is seen by many as the proper state of affairs even if, as Josh Knobe pointed out in the comments, given the rise of experimental philosophy, it is no longer the status quo.

Justifying Boundary-Policing, Argument 1

Is this methodological rationalism warranted? I invite people to suggest justifications for it and the corollary that experimental philosophy is not philosophy (I might not see it in the DN comments section so please drop me a line if you do). But I’ll take a crack at providing my own justification.

During the xphi wars (c. 2007 - 2018, with significant border clashes starting as early as 1998), methodological rationalism was often justified the following way:

Philosophy is ultimately interested in X. Empirical facts don’t bear at all on X (or only do so trivially). Therefore, empirical studies are not accomplishing anything philosophically fruitful.

To get a form of this argument going, one needs to a) think that the goal of philosophy is entirely located in modal and/or conceptual space (if one even sees those as distinct) and b) have suitably platonic beliefs about what modal and/or conceptual space is. This makes any empirically-informed philosophy completely out of the question, unless all the empirical data is limited to a trivial role, e.g., in helping us map out modal space by justifying arguments of the form “P is contingently true therefore P is possible”.

Perhaps best highlighted by the fact I expect that only a minority of readers would endorse an argument like this, any version of the argument will rely on contested philosophical claims. There certainly are philosophers who take philosophy’s proper scope to fall completely outside of the reach of empirical facts. Nonetheless, empirically-informed philosophy makes up a huge chunk of the discipline (to say nothing of applied philosophy) whose status as philosophy is incompatible with the above argument for methodological rationalism. Therefore, the above argument doesn’t offer us a way to exclude experimental philosophy from philosophy, at least not without delegitimizing lots of other stuff too.

Let’s pause and suppose we do endorse the above argument. What sort of critique of experimental philosophy does it allow? It provides justification to critique experimental philosophy’s aim: “I think your underlying commitments about philosophy’s ultimate goal are mistaken”. It also supports the critique of its methods: “I think you’re mistaken about the relationship between empirical facts and the goal of philosophical inquiry”. I do not, however, see anything in the argument that warrants one to say “this isn’t philosophy”, especially because any version of its premises will themselves be philosophically contested. Imagine telling a virtue ethicist “this isn’t philosophy” because they aren’t a consequentialist. That would be unprofessional – even childish – and not in the spirit of collective inquiry.

Justifying Boundary-Policing, Argument 2

With some adjustment we can make similar argument for methodological rationalism that doesn’t rely on controversial views of philosophy’s aim and appears to make more space for empirically-informed philosophy:

Philosophy is ultimately interested in X. X is not wholly settled by empirical facts. Collecting empirical facts relevant to X are the purview of other disciplines and are not in the purview of philosophy. Therefore, philosophy’s role is to reflect on the empirical facts relevant to settling X, not collecting them.

The key premise is the third one, “Collecting empirical facts relevant to X are the purview of other disciplines and are not in the purview of philosophy.” This is a strange posture to take towards disciplinary boundaries. Disciplines don’t “own” methods. Psychology can still use randomized controlled trials of human behavior even though economists and HCI scholars do too.

Disciplines also don’t own the scope in which methods are used. Suppose a chemist is researching how two molecules interact in various conditions. To get a better understanding, they (let’s suppose) borrow a fancy method from physics that allows them to study movements of individual molecules. Even if there might be a sense in which they are engaged in physics, there is nonetheless still a sense in which they are engaged in chemistry. Because the chemist is still ultimately interested in a chemistry question, they are still engaged in chemistry, even if they’ve strayed a bit into blurry interdisciplinary space. The scope of the motivating inquiry therefore seems to be sufficient for being member of that discipline.

Even worse for the argument, empirically-informed philosophy again makes a hash of things. Once we grant the legitimacy of empirically-informed philosophy, we have granted that some philosophical questions (partially) rest on empirical facts. By resolving those empirical facts, we thereby help resolve philosophical questions. Often those empirical facts have already been resolved, but sometimes scientists have not done the work to resolve it. That might be because they have not gotten around to testing it, or, as is often the case, from the point of view of their discipline, it isn’t a question worth answering.

If a philosopher tests one of those empirical facts themselves, they do not suddenly cease being philosophers. The question they are trying to answer does not suddenly cease being a philosophical one. Because the underlying motivation and inquiry is philosophical, the empirical study is itself philosophy.

As Thomas Nadelhoffer argued in the comments section of Daily Nous:

take philosophers working in action theory who contantly make psychological claims about self-deception, weakness of will, practical irrationality, free will, intentional action, and the like. Sometimes, psychologists have already collected the data relevant to these claims. Sometimes, they have not. If a philosopher runs the relevant studies to shed light on these philosophically relevant empirical claims, that just is experimental philosophy. […]

But why isn’t this just psychology, not philosophy? I think this is only a question one would ask if they hadn’t spent any time reading much experimental philosophy and psychology. The experimental design and the presentation of the findings are methodologically similar. But the way the papers are framed and the discussion of the findings are distinctly different. Most work in psychology is not aimed at shedding light on the empirical claims made by philosophers. Experimental philosophers run experiments to shed precisely such light.

The key factor here is what motivates the inquiry. I’ll be the first to admit that not everything that calls itself experimental philosophy is motivated by distinctly philosophical questions, but a lot of it is. As discussion above highlights, there is very, very little space for a principled dividing line between empirically-informed philosophy and philosophically-motivated experimental philosophy.

Science and Philosophy

I am left suspecting “this isn’t philosophy” is nothing more than an unreflective knee-jerk reaction - a knee-jerk reaction that, may I remind people apt to make it, has real professional consequences for many very good and creative scholars addressing philosophical questions.

It certainly comes from the sense that philosophy and science are in some sense in different, non-overlapping spheres. More than that, science is the lesser domain. One may not sully themselves with doing science if one is to be a philosopher, as it is the thing they only do over there.

Notably, however, the separation of philosophy and science is, at least on the timescale of western philosophy, a recent trend. In much of western philosophy’s history, philosophers were also people of science. We tend to look back at these authors and carve up their work between being philosophy and science, but it is far from obvious that they saw their work the same way.

Take Descartes. Descartes was extremely interested in anatomy. Prior to writing the Meditations, he observes human dissections and dissected parts of animals himself. Descartes’ active, scientific interest in anatomy was more than just another area of study for a renaissance polymath. Significant parts of the Meditations draw on his understanding of anatomy, most saliently his picture of how the mind and body interact. Today we may see the passages about the pineal gland and animal spirits as inessential tangents, but to my eyes - and I’ll happily defer to a Descartes scholar or intellectual historians - Descartes saw his empirical posits about the body as one in the same project as the rest of the Meditations. But even if Descartes didn’t see it this way, it is clear Descartes’ own scientific practice played a role in the development of his philosophical views.

Descartes isn’t alone. As recently as the early 20th Century, the American pragmatists had their hands dirty. Charles Sanders Peirce was an extremely accomplished scientist in his own right, working for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey for decades and helping map the Milky Way. Peirce’s philosophical work on the logic of science is also responsible for coining “abduction”. William James, like Peirce, got his start in science, helping establish American psychology. In “Will to Believe”, a work of epistemology, James places key theoretical importance on how one’s experience makes certain beliefs a “live” possibility. John Dewey ran an experimental school where he tested educational theories. Dewey wrote philosophical works arguing that the self is, in contrast to the Cartesian soul, continuous with the environment.

These all look like cases where philosophers’ own empirical work informed their philosophy in one way or another. One might object that these are not analytic philosophers and thus, for one reason or another unique to analytic philosophy, the analogy to experimental philosophy doesn’t work. My response to this objection returns us to the main point of my first post. If analytic philosophy is incompatible with philosophy-science, that’s fine. Experimental philosophy isn’t analytic philosophy. That nonetheless doesn’t entail that experimental philosophy isn’t philosophy.