If one cruises the internet for philosophy sites, one gets the impression that the hot new thing in (analytic) philosophy is something called “Experimental Philosophy.” I have been hearing this term for a while, partly because one of its golden boys, a cat at UNC named Joshua Knobe, was profiled as a “rising star” in the Chronicle last year. A big discussion of “X-phi” (as the obnoxiously cutesy seem to be calling it) has been kicked up on the net recently, though, because of an article on Salon.
After looking at some of this discussion, I wondered to myself, "what might all of this have to do with things happening in Continental philosophy?" I then figured I would post some of my own thoughts and ask you all about it.
First, though, lets have a brief description of Experimental phil
from the horse's (Knobe's) mouth:
"Since the earliest days of analytic philosophy, it has been a common practice to appeal to intuitions about particular cases. Typically, the philosopher presents a hypothetical situation and then makes a claim of the form: ‘In this case, we would surely say....’ This claim about people’s intuitions then forms a part of an argument for some more general theory about the nature of our concepts or our use of language.
One puzzling aspect of this practice is that it so rarely makes use of standard empirical methods. Although philosophers quite frequently make claims about ‘what people would ordinarily say,’ they rarely back up those claims by actually asking people and looking for patterns in their responses. In recent years, however, a number of philosophers have tried to put claims about intuitions to the test, using experimental methods to figure out what people really think about particular hypothetical cases. At times, the results have been extremely surprising."
So, experimental philosophers actually do the empirical legwork (the most popular form of which seems to be adminstering surveys--a practice which is not strictly speaking an experiment, I think, but what the hell...). As an aside, it strikes me that the only thing that is at all new about this is that some guys who have philosophy degrees have hit the streets and administered surveys and so-forth, rather than relying on psychologists, etc. to do the empirical work.
Now, I don't know how interested I am in the specific work that is getting called "Experimental Philosophy." I do wonder, however, how the emphasis on empirical research jibes with continental philosophy. Well, one quick answer (which I think is ultimately a half truth) is that it doesn't fit with most of Continental phil, because it is based on the valorizing of the methods of the empirical natural sciences, and that is something of which continental philosophy is generally critical...
Consider, though, Horkheimer's early Frankfurt School plan for interdisciplinary research. It clearly included a strong commitment to using empirical data (and they even used surveys and questionairres...). There is still a commitment in critical theory (say, for example, in the attention Honneth pays to people's experiences of injustice) to such research.
In any event, I am interested to hear what you all think about the relation of continental philosophy to empirical research, both in terms of the history of continental phil (for--a possibly lame--example, is there room for empirical research in Heidegger's project) and in terms of your own research. Could there be an "Experimental Continental Philosophy"?
