Experimental Philosophy and Continental Philosophy
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:
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"?
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"?
Posted by J.C. Berendzen on
Thursday March 9, 2006 at 3:55pm
Now, I'm all about the idea of philosophy engaging the doxai that people actually have and not the doxai that philosophers think that they ought to have.
I hope that this gripe is not too off-track. But I wouldn't mind a clarification of the different senses of empirical research that one might employ.
Ammon
Why is it empirical? Well, the point of a lot of it is to say that A) analytic philosophers make assumptions about people's intuitions and B) that is an empirical matter, in the straightforward sense that one could actually try to find out what people's intuitions are. Furthermore, they assume C) that most analytic philosophers don't actually bother to find out what people really think, and so make bald-faced claims, and D) the actual empirical research would show that they are not just bald-faced, but often wrong.
It strikes me that (B), while not unproblematic, is at least fairly straightforward. I suppose one problem with it might be the assumption that we can actually observe people's intutions by asking them to report them. This is also, of course, a possible criticism of the use of surveys. Ultimately, though, I think this criticism is that it is a bad way to gather empirical information, not that the information that it is attempting to gather is not empirical. In the end, I am not sure why you wonder if the kind of stuff Knobe is doing is actually empirical...
I am all for refining what empiricism might mean, of course, but so are loads of analytic philosophers. It also seems to me that your polemic might be leading you to conflate "empirical knowledge" with "empirical knowledge that is philosophically interesting." The reference to the hellenistic tradition is also a bit of a non-sequitur, I think--or, it might actually fit with Ex Phil. They want to remove opinion and replace it with empirical knowledge by replacing philosophers' opinions about people's intuitions with empirical knowledge of what those intuitions are.
Now, are the specific things that the Ex Phil people really that interesting? I have my doubts, but I haven't read enough of it to say for sure. Knobe's stuff that I read struck me as pointless, but I have little invested in the arguments into which he was asserting himself. Broadly, though, I do think that empirical knowledge is useful for philosophy.
I am not sure what Ammon's claim means (it was surely "about the questionaire, " insofar as those questionaires supposedly turned up useful info), but it is clearly true that they used them in a different way from the Ex Phil guys. Lets again get a description of the point at hand from one of the horses mouths. The following two paragraphs are taken from a letter written by Erich Fromm:
"You ask me about any concrete studies which I have done in the field of social character. I want to mention a few. First, a study done at the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in 1931, on the authoritarian versus the revolutionary character. The purpose of the study was to try to find out how the workers and employees would react to Hitler, if and when he came to power. Opinionwise they were all 100% against Nazism, but we were convinced that it depended on the relative strength of authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian forces in their character structure whether they would fight against Hitler, whether they would become Nazis once Hitler had won, or whether they would become neither ardent fighters against nor ardent admirers of Hitler. We were able to predict almost accurately the percentage of people who would choose one of these three ways (as it turned out to be later) by analyzing the character structure of this group.
The means we used to find out the character structure was the »interpretative questionnaire’, in which we did not take the answers at face value, as given, but interpreted their unintended meaning from the specific formulation of the answer, which was taken down by the interviewer textually. Such an interpretation is not too different from the interpretation of statements in a psychoanalytic interview, in which very small details are indicative of the character structure; if you have 100 questions or so, then the consistency in the pattern that emerges in the replies shows that one does not deal with an accidental or arbitrary interpretation of just one statement. I shall send you later a more detailed report on this study. The questionnaire we used was actually published in the volume Autorität und Familie..."
The Ex Phil people do not use "interpretive questionaires"--so far as I can tell, they go out, ask people things, and take the answers at face value to be reports of their intuitions. I agree that this is problematic--for one thing, the average person on the street confronted by a philosopher may be incline to screw with him as much as give him a straight answer (I probably would be like this!).
I think there are some big problems with the "interpretive questionaire," but I agree with the general attitude behind it. That attitude is also a kind of foundational aspect of critical theory--viz. the notion that if one is going to do moral/social philosophy, one needs to know about people's intuitions about society and morality, BUT those intuitions are usually occluded or distorted, and the work of the theorist is required to tease them out (this is why, for example, Habermas refers to part of his work as "maieutic").
I do, however, think that there are good reasons for being careful simply about calling reportage on people's opinions “empirical.” This might, however, be an objection to the whole appeal to common sense that Ex Phil (I’ll stick with that do) wants to address in analytic philosophy. I can see the sense in which going out and asking people what they believe will call into question what philosophers have claimed to be common-sensical (anyone who has taught intro to philosophy will be perfectly aware of this without having to conduct a survey), but this strikes me as a reason for dropping the appeal to common sense. Granted that much of what philosophers have said that people mean by concepts is not what people actually think they mean. But this might just as easily be what makes what they say interesting. I hate to agree with Sosa, but the point is whether or not they are right. And, again, as much as some analytic philosophy irks me, I’m elitist enough to believe that the opinions of what many of them think is common-sensical is of much more interest than what regular people think common sense is. The core area where we might actually disagree then might be, as you recognize, about the relative importance of people’s actual moral intuitions which, I will admit, I am not particularly inclined to care about (admittedly putting me in roughly the same position that you once admitted you were in with regards to caring about the starry sky above). I’ll stick with one of the examples that both the Slate article and the link you bring up mention: are people really “natural incompatibilists” (do they hold that free will and determinism are incompatible, and that we are potentially morally blameworthy for things we don’t freely do?)? Many philosophers have assumed that people naturally are incompatibilists, but certain questions show that they are not. But the question remains: should we really care if people think that someone can be morally culpable for something they didn’t freely do? We might have a more accurate assessment of a number of people’s opinions about a certain issue but this only becomes philosophically relevant in any sense when we connect these beliefs up with other beliefs, something which Fromm does. My concern with opinion-poll philosophy, and my reasons for insisting that the example of ancient Greek philosophy is relevant here, is that such an approach might render that connective work impossible. Other methods of analyzing public opinion might be philosophically worthwhile if they elucidate the concepts behind opinion, but I take it that part of the point of the skeptical attack on opinion was that, in fact, opinion has no concepts behind it (there is no logos that informs doxa). To cite another bandied about example of public opinion: a majority of Americans are in favor of legislation that would define marriage as a heterosexual relationship. But a majority of Americans are also against banning gay marriage. Does this mean that our concept of marriage should somehow be construed in such a way that these two positions are incompatible? No. The point is that opinion doesn’t bother thinking about how it’s beliefs fit together. I can say one thing today and something else tomorrow, and I needn’t trouble myself with how they fit together (on this note, I think that Heidegger’s discussion of ambiguity (“Zweideutigkeit”) in Chapter Five of Division One of Being and Time could perhaps be rendered as “double-speak.”). One can imagine social-scientific approaches which look at how empirical concepts are formed in a constructive way: my (admittedly, indeed proudly) a priori hunch is that (e)X Phi(l) ain’t such an approach. And, since we are really dealing here with different possible meaningful configurations of concepts, we can also imagine other ways of doing so which, if they are empirical, are empirical in different ways. The Platonic dialogue, and the skeptical employment of the dialectic by later Acamedicians comes to mind here.
On this note, let me end this too-lengthy reply, by returning to Joe’s original question: how might empirical research figure into various continental figures, for example Heidegger. This strikes me as a great question, one worth discussing in more depth. My reasons for insisting on a clarification as to how “empirical” is being used is because I suspect that if there is a fruitful answer to that question, it won’t be by looking at how language is ordinarily used. I am reminded of the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (I’m going from memory here, because I’m too lazy to actually look it up), where Kant says that a good deal of philosophy has in fact been analytic inquiry into concepts supplied by experience, which have mistaken itself for being a synthetic form of inquiry. The point, I take it, is that so-called “rationalists” aren’t being non-empirical. They’re being dishonestly empirical. They are not acknowledging that the concepts that they analyze are empirical concepts, whose content is supplied by experience, and that, if there is any non-empirical purity to them, it is only to their form. I’m not trying to be disingenuous or merely quibble with words when I say that I think that the imaginative work done by Plato’s dialogue ought to be seen as giving his philosophy an empirical edge, albeit a very different sort of edge than the kind that many nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers think that he should have. And it is of course a truism to say that “experience” remains a crucial concept in the philosophy of Hegel or Husserl and, through them, into Heidegger. But the meaning of empirical is such that it isn’t readily treatable by the sort of experimental approach to experience that modern science has made the hallmark of what we often take to be the gold-standard for empirical research. This is why I think a good deal of Rorty’s criticisms of Heidegger, are off the mark. Granted that if Heidegger had looked at different texts, analyzed different kinds of experience, read different poets, etc. his “history of Being” would have looked different: that doesn’t mean that he’s not examining some texts, treating actual experience, and really wrestling with poets. The question is: is he doing so in an interesting, responsible way? And what is special about their poetry that makes it worth treating (I’m conceding to Rorty that we ought to say “special” and not “unique”). And anyone who familiarizes themselves with the philosophy of someone like Heidegger or Hegel quickly learns that even though there might not be experiments or experiences which would “falsify” their truth-claims in the way that modern science’s truth claims can be, their claims to try to talk about experience and can “fit” with experience in a way that may or may not be true. On these questions in Heidegger, I do think that his approach to art is the best place to think about this (For me, that discussion is intrinsically linked with his interest in Being and Time in the temporality of concept-formation, the roots for his famous treatment of Kant’s doctrine of schematism). From there, we quickly get back into questions about imaginative variance that occupied Husserl and to the discussions of exemplarity and ideality that have been so important to deconstructive readings of Husserl.
If my last few posts have been over-the-top, please forgive me. I’ve just flown back from Utah, and so my inclination to make widely indefensible claims is in full swing still (a few more days of teaching will hopefully sober me up).