The Psychology of Philosophy

The Psychology of Philosophy
(for the Experimental Psychology pre-conference of the
Society for Philosophy and Psychology)

Eric Schwitzgebel
for June 25, 2008


i.
Experimental philosophy, as an intellectual movement, has so far been focused mostly on one sort of experiment: polling intuitions, or at least what philosophers would ordinarily call “intuitions”. That is, experimental philosophy has centered on asking people for their judgments about issues of philosophical dispute, or more commonly their judgments about particular cases that warring philosophers would judge differently.

For example: Joshua Knobe, Bertram Malle, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon and others have asked people for their judgments about whether certain actions are intentional; Eddy Nahmias, Shaun Nichols, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and others have asked people their views about determinism and moral responsibility; Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, John Mikhail, and others have asked people for their judgments about the morality of killing one person to save others; Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe, and others have probed people’s judgments about causation.

It’s high time philosophy as a discipline got serious about such issues. Since at least the rise of “ordinarily language philosophy” in the middle of the 20th century, philosophers have explicitly and self-consciously relied on appeals to what ordinary people find intuitive. The bottled-up sense many philosophers have long had that we haven’t been held empirically to account for such claims, constituted a pent-up demand for experimental philosophy – a demand that partly explains the movement’s sudden prominence and attention once it was finally articulated as a research program and experimental results began coming in.

But clearly philosophers make experimentally testable claims that aren’t just expressions of what they, or “we”, or people in general find intuitive. We should think about whether experimental philosophy has room for experiments of other sorts, or whether to bring them under the tent threatens the coherence and vision of the movement.

ii.
It would help in thinking about this if I knew better what a philosophical claim was. Philosophers, of course, make all sorts of claims. Some of them are clearly merely background assumptions, the testing of which wouldn’t count as philosophy – that we dream at night, that starving people in far-away countries would benefit from our charity, that chimpanzees can be trained to use hand signals. But what about the claim that there is a fundamental randomness to physical reality that cannot be resolved by means of hidden variables? Or the claim that human cognition is at root the manipulation of representational tokens? Or the claim that science is, or is not, more successful when it proceeds by means of biased investigators pushing their hypotheses than it would be if everyone were impartial? Are these philosophical claims, strictly speaking? And if so, is any researcher who designs an experiment aimed at shining light on a claim of this sort thereby doing experimental philosophy?

Now in fact my own view is that there is no clear line between the philosophical and the non-philosophical – that, as Alison Gopnik put it in a paper I co-wrote with her, “philosophy is just very theoretical anything” (Gopnik and Schwitzgebel 1998). Well, that’s a little too simple and compressed – but if something like it is right, then philosophy of biology is just very theoretical biology, philosophy of mind is just very theoretical psychology, philosophy of science is just the broadest inquiry into the scientific enterprise, and so forth, and the philosophical and the empirical or experimental will fade into each other. Researchers on that hazy border between philosophy and the empirical will be doing empirical or empirically-informed philosophy. If to qualify as an “experimental philosopher” one must actually conduct the experiments oneself, then most experimental philosophers will turn out to be employed by science departments. On the other hand if one needn’t actually perform the experiments then there are many more experimental philosophers than appear on most lists and bibliographies of experimental philosophy.

Either way, this characterization of experimental philosophy as research on the hazy border between the philosophical and the empirical makes experimental philosophy much older than it is ordinarily taken to be, and to span a much broader class of work than it is ordinarily taken to span. One could restrict it by including only people employed in philosophy departments who run experiments, so the field basically consists of experiments done by philosophy professors. But this is a strange and too simplistically sociological category. So maybe experimental philosophy is better conceived of in the relatively narrow way I suggested earlier, as restricted to the testing of intuitions about philosophical cases? That would make most of the people speaking in this pre-conference experimental philosophers, but not me.

iii.
Here’s another broad class of claims philosophers often make (though not as often as they make claims about their intuitions) that admits of experimental exploration: claims about their conscious experience or phenomenology. Sometimes phenomenological claims are made as independent philosophical theses. For example, there’s currently a hot dispute between philosophers who think that there’s a distinctive phenomenology of thought, different in kind from the phenomenology of emotions and imagery, and those who think there is no such phenomenology. In the philosophy of perception, there’s a long-standing dispute between those who think that our concepts and categories thoroughly permeate and infect even the most basic perceptual experiences and those who hold that people with very different understandings of a scene may still have exactly the same perceptual experience of it. In other cases, phenomenological claims are made in the course of arguing for other non-phenomenological theses – for example, libertarians about free will sometimes make claims about the phenomenology of freedom in support of their views; and the distinctive experience of selfhood, or lack of such an experience, is sometimes appealed to in arguments about personal identity. Sometimes, phenomenological claims seem to play both roles – as, for example, claims about whether we visually or auditorially experience what we’re not attending to, which are both debated in their own right and in the context of their implications for a general theory of consciousness.

Such phenomenological claims have two things in common with claims about what’s intuitive that make them ripe for inclusion under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”: First, it is mainly philosophers who make such claims; and second, there is no substantial tradition outside of philosophy dedicated to the empirical evaluation of the claims. These facts may be mere historical accident: Back in the days of introspective psychology, psychologists loved to dispute issues of this sort. But fortunately or unfortunately, psychology still has not sufficiently rebounded from the behaviorist revolution that such general phenomenological claims are broadly discussed by mainstream psychologists. Instead, disputes about phenomenology, like (until recently) disputes about matters of moral intuition, are generally conducted by philosophers in their armchairs consulting their own experience and impressions. And, of course, each philosopher seems to have a different impression. We philosophers need to get more systematic, experimental, and empirical about these topics.

For philosophers with an experimental bent, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here. In some cases, simple polls or questionnaires may cast light on the issues – asking undergraduates if they think they have constant tactile experience of their feet in their shoes or not, or asking subjects whether two figures, one thought of as a sigma and one thought of as an M on its side would generate the same visual experience. In other cases, one might want to sample experience by giving people beepers to wear during everyday activity, and/or one might want to conduct structured interviews.

Philosophy is often grounded in introspective claims about consciousness. These introspective claims can be, but rarely are, examined experimentally.

iv.
Here’s another type of empirically explorable claim that philosophers often make, explicitly or implicitly – claims about why they believe the philosophical theses they believe. Typically, philosophers present themselves as believing things for good reasons, because the arguments compel it. This is of course almost entirely bogus, and here’s how I know that: On day one of your first class in normative ethics, you were either sympathetic or unsympathetic to consequentialism. Those sympathies almost certainly didn’t change by the end of the class. Since at the beginning of the class, you had no appreciation of the subtle arguments pro and con, those subtle arguments can’t really be what’s driving your view. Almost always, I find, we are immediately attracted to or repulsed by philosophical views – long before we really appreciate the arguments, long before we have a sense of what philosophers of different leanings consider to be fatal objections to our views – and those attractions and repulsions don’t change much over time. So why do you love (or hate) Kantian ethics? Why do you accept (or reject) compatibilism about free will? Why do you think metaphysical idealism has to be false? If it’s not a deep understanding of the arguments, what is it? I doubt you have much idea.

There is room for experimental philosophy here – experiments or other empirical studies aimed at discerning what factors correlate with what philosophical views. Thomas Nadelhoffer and others are running an on-line survey right now that will attempt to correlate views about free will with features of one’s psychological profile. Shaun Nichols has looked at historical data to support his hypothesis that philosophers are mainly drawn to compatibilism because of an antecedent commitment to determinism. I have looked at the relationship between culture-specific metaphors and the prevalence of certain views about conscious experience. To highlight some of my own work: Are people (including philosophers) more likely to say that dreams rarely contain colored elements if the film media around them are predominantly black and white? Are people more likely to say that a circular object (such as a coin) viewed obliquely looks elliptical if the dominant media for describing vision are media like paintings and photographs that involve flat, projective distortions? When people say that they literally see red when angry or that they experience an idea as literally located in the back of their heads or that they experience thought in general as transpiring inside their heads as opposed to in their chests – how much do such claims vary cross-culturally? Do they vary reliably with differences in actual phenomenology that are being accurately reported, or are our introspective judgments driven at least as much by the theories and ways of speaking dominant in our culture at the time?

We can attempt to determine empirically the psychological roots of different philosophical views. Of course even a suspiciously motivated view may be right – to assume it can’t be right is the genetic fallacy – but an understanding of the psychological roots of our philosophical commitments will surely shine an important light on those commitments.

v.
Finally, in my bid to broaden our conception of the kinds of experiments that can be done under the heading of “experimental philosophy” let me mention experiments about the practical consequences of particular philosophical views. Now maybe (maybe!) views in the physical sciences stand or fall independently of their practical consequences, but I don’t think this can be the case in philosophy. Given the choice between two conceptual schemes or two moral visions, one’s quite in the right to consider the practical consequences of accepting one scheme or one moral vision – perhaps, indeed, there is no other way to decide, if the views are self-coherent and coherent with the empirical facts.

This is the backside of study of the causes of our philosophical views; it’s a study of their effects. So, for example, we could study whether courses in consequentialist ethics are more or less likely to generate actual moral behavior than courses in deontological ethics or virtue ethics. We can study – as I am doing right now – whether philosophical reflection has any positive effect on moral behavior whatsoever, and if so under what conditions. We can look at the moral behavior of ethics professors, the scientific research of Popperians, the real-world coping of radical skeptics. Things might look good and so shine a positive light on these philosophical enterprises; or they might look not so good.

vi.
You might think of what I’m proposing as not the philosophy of psychology but rather the psychology of philosophy – a subfield of potentially great interest and consequence for anyone interested in the origin and grounding of philosophical theses, but one that has not been pursued seriously since the time of Nietzsche, James, and Dewey.