375 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Stereotype-Based Intuitions: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Experimental Philosophyâs âSources Projectâ
Experimental philosophyâs âsources projectâ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess their evidentiary value. This paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by brief philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception (âargument from hallucinationâ). We trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension. We employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to show that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are made from less salient uses of the verb âto seeâ. This yields a debunking explanation which resolves the philosophical paradox
Diagnostic Experimental Philosophy
Experimental philosophyâs much-discussed ârestrictionistâ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as âarguments from hallucinationâ)
Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy
Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such âantinomic problemsâ that proceeds from an examination of âordinary languageâ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and âcommon senseâ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austinâs paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes âexperimental critical OLPâ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophyâs âsources programâ, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems
Therapie statt Theorie. Das Big Typescript als Schluessel zu Wittgensteins spaeter Philosophieauffassung
The paper clarifies therapeutic ideas about philosophical method which Wittgenstein puts forward in his "Big Typescript". It does so by analysing how Wittgenstein treats the question 'What is meaning?', in that part of the same work from which the opening sections of his "Philosophical Investigations" derive. On this basis, the paper explains why Wittgenstein set himself a therapeutic goal, why this is reasonable, and how he sought to attain that goal without 'pronouncing new truths about the subject of the investigation', viz. meaning
Conceptual Control: On the feasibility of conceptual engineering
This paper empirically raises and examines the question of âconceptual controlâ: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such âconceptual controlâ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkersâ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise
- âŠ