Experimental Philosophy

Joseph Ulatowski

1. Introduction

There are surprisingly many different methods that a project in

analytic philosophy may employ to address perennial
philosophical problems.1 While conceptual analysis was chief
among the methods employed by twentieth century analytic
philosophy, other prominent methods have included ordinary
language philosophy, reflective equilibrium, and Canberra
planning.2 Conceptual analysis consists of proposing a definition or
analysis of a concept in response to a question like “what is
knowledge?” by stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for
what knowledge is. Since many of these analyses draw conclusions
from empirical facts or turn on empirical questions, philosophers
naturally began to wonder how best to evaluate these assumptions.
Surely, these empirical assumptions couldn’t be evaluated by a

1
It may be helpful for me to narrow down what I am talking about when I discuss analytic philosophy.
As I use the term, analytic philosophy consists of projects that do not typically call upon empirical
data, either by citing literature in the natural and social sciences or by performing experiments
themselves and trace their origins to the Anglo-American tradition begun by Gottlob Frege on the
continent and Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Britain.
2
For a good overview of conceptual analysis, see selections in Flew (1956); for ordinary language
philosophy, see Hanfling (2000); for reflective equilibrium, see Goodman (1955); and for Canberra
planning, see contributions to Braddon-Mitchell and Nola (2009).
priori means alone, without at least doing some proper empirical
due diligence. This turn in our thinking prompted us to become
more honest by being more scientific about our philosophical
thinking, i.e., to employ a method that tests these empirical
assumptions. Enter experimental philosophy.
Experimental philosophy (“x-phi” for short) is one of the
newest tools for the philosopher’s toolkit, and its main function is
to test the veracity of empirical facts.3 X-phi is a way of doing
philosophy that uses empirical methods, such as questionnaires or
surveys, corpus analyses, or neuroscientific methods (e.g., fMRIs,
EEGs, etc.), to inform one’s position in a philosophical debate.
Based on this short list of different methods, we shouldn’t think
that there is just one way of doing x-phi; instead, it calls upon an
abundant suite of experimental techniques.
While some research in x-phi has criticized well-established
conclusions or has shown how unreliable intuitions are for use as
evidence, this is not its sole, or even primary, contribution. The
main function of x-phi, so I will argue, is more generally to bring
empirical methods to bear on philosophical questions. And doing
so should be understood as an exercise in intellectual humility,
instead of one whose role is to stamp out analytic philosophy. I will
devote §§2-3 to clarifying what x-phi is and why philosophers
should embrace it. §4 will show that the distinction between the
‘positive’ and ‘negative’ program in x-phi is now too coarse-grained
as a description of the diverse projects that fall under its banner
because of how work in x-phi has evolved since the late 1990s. To
argue that empirical results are relevant to philosophy in a way that

3
Two things should be said here. First, at least one other new tool comes immediately to mind:
conceptual engineering, cf. Isaac (Forthcoming). Second, experimental philosophy may be confined to
questions of analytic philosophy. It is not clear to me that experimental methods may be successfully
employed to address issues in continental philosophy. To my mind, that is an open question and one
that I will not attempt to settle here.

2
maximizes intellectual humility, in §§4.1-4.4, I will present a new
taxonomy for x-phi. According to this taxonomy, there are different
means by which empirical facts can inform our philosophical
conclusions. Some projects show how empirical facts bear directly
on morally significant behavioral change. By contrast, other
projects show how psychological facts may be prima facie evidence
for philosophical conclusions, how they may be revelatory for
philosophers, or how they may curb our enthusiasm for some
widely accepted philosophical intuition. X-phi’s readiness to defer
to the evidence is connected with how the scientific method may be
a form of control of our unconscious or implicit biases. When an
intellectually humble person realizes that they don’t know
something, they admit as much and then set about trying to
acquire the knowledge that they need (cf. Tanesini 2021). This is
precisely the course that is followed by experimental philosophers.

2. What is experimental philosophy?

It is important to begin with a working definition of “experimental

philosophy” and its component parts, such as “intuition,” before we
embark upon a defence of its relevance for analytic philosophy.4 I
gave a straightforward definition of “experimental philosophy” at
the outset of this chapter, but, for purposes of clarity and
continuity, let me tighten up that definition by rehearsing a
definition first introduced by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols
(2008, 2017):

4
One may be tempted to include work that cites experimental work or empirical studies as part of
experimental philosophy. For example, think of work in philosophy of mind that calls upon cognitive
science, neuroscience, or psychology in defense of their positions. For purposes of this chapter, we
will confine experimental philosophy to work that actually performs empirical studies (cf. Prinz 2008).

3
 Experimental philosophydef - a means of doing research that
uses empirical methods, usually employed by linguistics,
psychology, and the social sciences, to investigate the use of
philosophically salient concepts in natural language or to
explore the psychological underpinnings of philosophical
problems.5

Research in x-phi thus “brings together two key elements”:

1. the kinds of questions and theoretical frameworks

traditionally associated with philosophy; and
2. the kinds of experimental methods traditionally associated
with psychology and cognitive science. (Knobe and Nichols
2017: 1)

So, for research in philosophy to be a piece of x-phi, its focus

should be a philosophical problem and the methods the research
uses should be those that are commonly employed by the social
sciences.
Practitioners of x-phi use a diverse range of methods and
experimental design. One popular experimental design derived
from social and cognitive psychology uses questionnaires to survey
respondents about their intuitions. Prominent among them are, for
instance, Joshua Knobe’s CEO harm and help scenarios testing
research participants about their non-reflective views of intentional
action (Knobe 2003, 2004; cf. Adams and Steadman 2004a, 2004b).6
Knobe discovered an interesting asymmetry where respondents

5
Of course other definitions of experimental philosophy have been offered, but they all closely
resemble the one provided by Knobe and Nichols (cf. Alexander 2012; Sytsma and Buckwalter 2016;
Sytsma and Livengood 2015).
6
There have been too many responses to Knobe’s original intentionality study to cite here, so I have
only chosen to cite the first two prominent responses to Knobe’s study.

4
seemed to have been moved to decide whether an action is
intentional, not based upon the action itself but the moral valence
of the consequences of the action, i.e., the side-effect of the action.
Here are the two scenarios:

Harm scenario:
The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the
board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. It
will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the
environment.’

The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don’t care at all about

harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit
as I can. Let’s start the new program.’

They started the new program. Sure enough, the

environment was harmed.

Help scenario:
The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the
board and said, ‘We are thinking of starting a new program. It
will help us increase profits, and it will also help the
environment.’

The chairman of the board answered, ‘I don’t care at all about

helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit
as I can. Let’s start the new program.’

They started the new program. Sure enough, the

environment was helped.

5
88% of respondents responded that the chairman intentionally
harmed the environment, while 77% of study participants said that
the chairman in the help scenario did not intentionally help the
environment. That is a strikingly odd result not only because it is
contrary to what many action theorists thought about intentional
action but also because the only difference between the two
scenarios is in one instance the environment was harmed and in
the other it was helped.
Questionnaires may seek to uncover individual differences,
whether it be by gender, sexual identity, socio-economic status,
education, philosophical sophistication, or ethnicity. Other
experiments may use more sophisticated technology like scans
from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), EEG
(electroencephalography), and NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy)
to analyze neural activity while study participants perform tasks,
such as being presented with a trolley case (cf. Greene et al. 2001).
Recently, experimental philosophers have begun using corpus
linguistics to draw conclusions about philosophical questions (e.g.,
Hansen et al. 2021; Sytsma et al. 2019; Ulatowski Forthcoming). The
aim of these studies is to collect and analyze existing linguistic data
on the use of words (Biber et al. 1998; McCarthy and O’Keefe 2010;
McEnery and Wilson 2001). This aim is pursued using corpora,
which are collections of written or oral texts that are typically
curated to give a balanced and representative picture of the target
domain of language use.
A focal point of x-phi is people’s intuitions. The definition of
“intuition” is less stable than the definition of x-phi. Some contend
that intuitions are beliefs (cf. Lewis 1983; Devitt 2006), while others
deem them to be dispositions to believe (cf. Bealer 1998; Sosa 1998;

6
Van Inwagen 1997). Still others say that they are sui generis states
(Pust 2000; Bengson 2015).7 Regardless, Jonathan Weinberg’s claim
that: “intuitions are odd critters” seems undeniable (2007: 318).
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, let’s define intuition as:

Intuitiondef - an immediate non-inferential response that one

has to a particular thought experiment or question.

What insight such intuitions provide us is also a matter of

debate. Frank Jackson (1998) has argued that intuitions inform us
about concepts, Ernest Sosa (2007) has contended that intuitions
inform us about the actual properties or relations that those
concepts pick out, and some have even suggested the whole project
of exploring intuitions is deeply misguided (Cappelen 2012;
Deutsch 2015; Williamson 2007). The remainder of this chapter
will set these controversial issues aside for other contributions in
this volume to address.8 Suffice it to say, my focus will be on the
question of x-phi’s relevance for philosophical debate in analytic
philosophy.

3. A Mechanism of Experimental Philosophy

Let’s begin with an anecdote that explains a mechanism for

deciding to pursue x-phi. Suppose that twenty graduate students
squeeze into a seminar room where the philosophy professor
reconstructs an argument from a longstanding philosophical
debate on the chalkboard. A premise of the argument appeals to
one’s intuitions about a particularly gnarly case (maybe involving
runaway trolleys, a friend’s travels to Barcelona, or randomly

7
A particularly ingenious analysis by Bill Ramsey (2019) argues that intuitions are “evidence
facilitators.”
8
See Chapter 10 and 12 of this volume.

7
vaporizing and materializing humans). The philosophy professor
confidently asserts in response to the thought experiment: “Anyone
would say y”. From this bit of intuition and other supporting
premises, the professor concludes z. Each of the twenty graduate
students, of course, is eager to impress their professor by raising a
novel objection against the argument. To do that, a student could
try to show how one of the premises is false or that the inference
from the premises to the conclusion fails. When an
experimentally-minded philosopher hears an argument like the
one above, she is likely to challenge the premise that relies upon
the empirical claim: “anyone would say y.” She will ask: Would
anyone say y in response to the thought experiment? If this empirical
claim depends upon empirical data that haven’t been collected and
analyzed, then she will hold that we should take the opportunity to
collect these data and determine whether they support the claim.
Once the data have been collected, we may find that they support
the claim, or we may find that they contravene it.
If empirical data support the empirical claim, then the
challenge proposed by the experimentally-minded critic seems to
have less bite. The data support the intuitive acceptability of y for
philosophers and non-philosophers, alike! Thus, their intuitions are
the same. However, the student may rightfully claim that the data
don’t necessarily support the intuitive acceptability of y. For one,
there might be something about the select sample population that
makes them prone to intuitively accept y when asked in the context
of a controlled experiment. Ask another population and the
findings may be very different. Second, maybe the data just fail to
show that y is intuitively unacceptable. Further experiments should
attempt to determine whether slight modifications of the
experimental instrument itself push

8
non-philosophers/philosophers to different intuitions than
philosophers/non-philosophers. So, that the data support the
empirical claim does not mean the end of experimental work.
If empirical data contravene the arguer’s empirical claim,
then not only does the objection stand but at least one of the
argument’s premises is false. Further investigations should be
conducted to see why the intuitions of philosophers and
non-philosophers diverge so dramatically. Maybe there is
something about training in academic philosophy that makes one
prone to have these intuitions. Maybe epistemic sophistication
matters more, such that a not-insignificant subset of
non-philosophers has the philosophical intuition, but those who
have not had much training in analysis, say outside of law or
philosophy, do not have these intuitions. Thus in cases like this, we
need to do further empirical work.
Instead of being receptive to the data, armchair philosophers
o en tend to reply in one of two ways. First, when the data fail to
support a philosopher’s argument, they may retreat to the position
that the intuitions one has in response to thought experiments are
unimportant for the argument. If the thought experiment is
removed, the argument stands on its own merit. Perhaps this is
true! Yet, even if it is true that the argument may stand on its own,
we should wonder why intuitions differ across populations with
varying philosophical sophistication. There may be something
about a philosopher’s training that makes them more inclined to
intuit y while the untrained person intuits not-y. If the philosophical
interest is an analysis of the concept x, where x is the concept and
not just the specialist’s concept, then something has gone
dreadfully wrong in the analysis. Moreover, if intuitions about the
target thought experiment are meant to function as some form of

9
evidence to support a philosophical conclusion and part of our
ambition as philosophers is to search for truth, then we should have
an interest in determining whether those intuitions are shared by
non-philosophers.
Next, there has been some pushback against x-phi to the
effect that some intuitions outweigh others because they are borne
out by disciplinary experts (Alexander 2012: 90-8; cf. Hales 2006;
Ludwig 2007; Ulatowski 2015). No doubt, extensive training and
expertise matter when we are assessing intuitions in a variety of
academic fields (e.g., physics), but it is highly questionable whether
expertise matters when it comes to intuitions about philosophical
topics such as the trolley problem or the reference of proper
names. We are all language users, and we are all concerned about
what we should and should not do. We should leave the analysis of
philosophical concepts to experts, but no experimental philosopher
is recommending that positions in the philosophical debate be
occupied or replaced by non-philosophers’ intuitions. Even
someone who believes that an expert’s intuitions should be
followed leaves room for empirical study.
Whatever it is that we take x-phi to be doing, it is safe to say
that its practitioners are skeptical of basing philosophical
arguments on one person’s intuitions. They are intellectually
curious, open-minded, and eager to see where the evidence takes
us. Since one person’s intuitions may not be shared with others, we
should design experiments to test what others’ intuitions are and
whether they align with the intuitions of philosophers. That will
enable us to report these intuitions and, at least potentially, use
them as additional pieces of evidence for a philosophical
conclusion. Therefore, the purpose of x-phi is merely to
recommend against our reliance upon what may turn out to be

10
very idiosyncratic views of eclectic topics. It is a recommendation
against a pernicious form of intellectual arrogance.

4. Experimental Philosophy and its Philosophical Relevance

For two decades, x-phi has largely been divided into either the
‘positive’ or the ‘negative’ program. However, looking back now on
how different projects in x-phi have deployed different methods,
this dichotomy now seems too coarse-grained to capture what
x-phi is, how it has been practiced, and what it has to offer to
analytic philosophy. In this section, I would like to propose an
alternative taxonomy, one that is more nuanced than the standard
view that empirical work has to be either for or against analytic
philosophy.
The proposed taxonomy is orthogonal to the
positive-negative divide. To show that, let me begin with a widely
accepted description of the distinction between the positive and
negative programs:

Some experimental philosophers [in the ‘positive program’]

are quite philosophically conservative: they see their work as
aiding in the traditional philosophical project of conceptual
analysis. Others [in the ‘negative program’] see their work as
primarily disruptive: they argue that empirical research into
the nature and sources of our intuitions reveals that they are
ill suited to serve as the foundation for philosophical
theorizing. (Plakias 2015: 6)

The distinction between the positive and negative programs can be

mistaken for a strong distinction between empirical projects that
are meant only to provide support for a philosophical thesis and

11
those that are meant only to undermine the evidential status of
intuitions. We should question whether such a strong distinction
may be made, since it is possible that work aimed at either goal can
simultaneously succeed at both. Plus, if we strictly follow the
distinction between the two programs, then too many interestingly
different forms of “being positive” or “being negative” may be
obscured. A new taxonomy, therefore, should be developed.
The remainder of this section will show how empirical facts,
i.e., the data collected in empirical studies, affect philosophical
claims or approaches to philosophical problems. I will confine the
discussion to four different cases:

A. When empirical facts question apparent philosophical

facts
B. When empirical facts change the mind of the philosopher
C. When empirical facts are evidence for a philosophical fact
D. When empirical facts just are philosophical facts

4.1 When empirical facts question apparent philosophical facts9

X-phi’s early discoveries seemed to justify misgivings about

orthodox analytic philosophy more than any previous argument
had done. Weinberg et al. (2001), for example, by finding study
participants with ties to East Asia whose intuitions did not resemble
those of their North American cohort, believed that they had
discovered a reason to reject Gettier’s infamous 1963
counterexample.10 In the same year as Weinberg et al.’s study,

9
The taxonomy of experimental philosophy follows the one recently developed by Barnard, Ulatowski,
and Weinberg (Forthcoming).
10
The results of Weinberg et al.’s (2001) study exploring cross-cultural differences in response to
Gettier examples have been shown not to replicate (Kim and Yuan 2015). My point here is to use
Weinberg et al.’s studies as a toy example of how experimental philosophy has moved from a state of

12
Greene et al. (2001) used fMRI data to question philosophical
assumptions about the distinction between Kantian deontological
ethics and Mill’s utilitarianism. The exuberance manifested by at
least these two empirical studies led to the view that empirical data
may be used as an empirical defeater against long-standing
philosophical assumptions.
Early work in x-phi showed how misleading evidence based
upon one philosopher’s intuitions should be overruled by studies
that report the intuitions of many because the dependence upon
unreliable, eclectic intuitions of philosophers may obstruct inquiry.
When evidence was found that philosopher’s intuitions were
idiosyncratic, experimental philosophers jubilantly declared that
intuitions were unreliable sources of evidence for philosophical
conclusions. Undermining problematic pieces of evidence can
constitute a substantive contribution to ongoing debates by moving
debates forward that may otherwise seem irredeemably stuck (See
Sytsma 2010; Sytsma and Livengood 2012).
But there are at least two ways in which the results of x-phi
can undermine problematic pieces of evidence. Suppose that a
debate over theories A and B has reached a stalemate because (i)
general considerations speak in favor of A, but (ii) B does a much
better job handling a particular class of intractable intuitions. It
might be that certain empirical studies give us reason to distrust
those B-supporting intuitions in particular, thereby undermining
them.
This sort of negative result is distinct from the sort of
negative result that is emphasized by champions of the negative
program. Negative programmers don’t aim to undermine

intellectual arrogance to one of intellectual humility. Also, see Chapter 24 “Epistemology” by Mona
Simion in this volume.

13
intuitions that support specific philosophical theories, thereby
providing support for competing philosophical theories that are
supported by competing intuitions. Rather, they aim to undermine
the reliability of armchair intuitions generally. Unlike the negative
program, the present taxonomy makes room for the more targeted
sort of negative result, Evidence that B-supporting intuitions are
not widely shared puts us in a good position to say that empirical
work tilts the overall body of evidence in A’s favor, even though the
psychological results are not themselves any sort of direct evidence
for A. They undermine the support for B, and thus indirectly give
us reason to endorse B’s rival.
Two illustrations would be helpful to better appreciate the
position. The first comes from recent work by Felipe DeBrigard on
Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” thought-experiment
(DeBrigard 2010). In Nozick’s original argument, we contemplate
entering an imagined virtual environment where every experience
is perfectly pleasurable (1974: ch. 3; 1989: 104). We have experiences
of falling in love or triumphing over adversity, but none of it is
truly happening and we are not aware of it being a fabricated
reality. Nozick suggests, and philosophers have widely agreed, that
we would not choose to enter irrevocably into the experience
machine (cf. Hewitt 2010; Silverstein 2000). Since we would choose
a less-pleasant reality over a more-pleasant hallucination, we seem
to be choosing in a way that implicitly rejects experiential
hedonism. DeBrigard, motivated by the widely confirmed
phenomenon of undermining status quo bias, turned Nozick’s
vignette around and asked the following of study participants: if
you learned that you’ve been in an experience machine all along, would
you choose to be extracted from life as you’ve known it, and placed
into reality? If people have an inclination to maintain the status

14
quo, then they would choose to remain in the experience machine
since that is the life they have been a part of all along. DeBrigard’s
experimental participants, confronted with that hypothetical,
strongly preferred to stay in their accustomed virtual unreality.
This overall pattern suggests that what drives the intuitions in these
cases is less something deep about hedonism, and more something
about anchoring (status quo bias) and loss aversion (Knetsch 1989;
Samuelson and Zeckhauser 1988). The philosophical payoff is
primarily subtractive, in proposing a defeater for Nozick’s original
argument, but no less real for that.
A second more prominent example of showing how
empirical facts may be partial defeaters for philosophical facts
crosses the line between work in philosophy and psychology.
Joshua Greene (2008, 2013) has demonstrated the existence of both
apparently consequentialist and apparently deontological ethical
intuitions in ordinary subjects’ evaluations of trolley cases and the
like. That result, in itself, would be unsurprising to philosophers.
Greene’s argument is rooted in his further psychological claim that
the putatively “Kantian” elements in our intuitive moral psychology
are based not in reason, but in emotion, as revealed, e.g., by
comparing fMRI scans of subjects making judgments about
trolley-type cases under more or less emotionally engaged
conditions, and also comparing the scans of those who make the
consequentialist choice and those who refrained from doing so.
According to Greene, the affective basis of those intuitions gives us
reason to doubt their evidentiary value—thus pruning away the
recalcitrant anti-consequentialist intuitions and shi ing more
evidentiary weight behind consequentialism. 11

11
See also Kelly (2011, 2018) on the untrustworthiness of disgust-based moral intuitions.

15
4.2. When empirical facts change the mind of the philosopher

In §4.1, I have outlined some attempts to re-describe the crucial

factors that drive our intuitive responses to certain cases, such as
Nozick’s experience machine case. The aim of these projects is to
show that such intuitive responses are not reliable pieces of
evidence for one reason or another. In addition to changing our
understanding of what intuitions are out there or what causes them,
empirical facts may also be able to change what intuitions
philosophers have in the first place. Recently philosophers have
noted that our judgments about cases may be driven by our
background empirical picture of the world, and hence may be
modified as that picture is updated.
Block and Stalnaker (1999: 42-43) have pointed out that even
putatively a priori philosophical judgments about a hypothetical
case may be shaped by the reasoner’s understanding of the
available scientific evidence. Even when we are engaged in what we
take to be an a priori argument, we may nonetheless be employing
empirical evidence that has been “absorbed” by us, whether via the
culture at large or by means of a more individualized course of
reading or observation. To a certain extent, this kind of use of
empirical facts has been around for a long time in philosophy (cf.
Ulatowski 2008). This picture of human judgment’s recruiting of
empirical background knowledge is itself shaped by learning about
scientific psychology. Thus to the extent that internalizing that
picture in turn implicitly shapes one’s judgments about such
matters as the epistemic scope of philosophical argumentation, the
attractiveness of a theory of intuition as a kind of pure rational
apperception, and so on, we have a further illustration of this
approach from psychological facts to philosophical results.

16
 While Block and Stalnaker emphasize theory and general
methodological experience, specific empirical findings, too, may
non-evidentially mould our philosophical judgments. Think here
of the influence that x-phi has had upon “conceptual engineering.”
There is already quite a bit of work that connects the potential
descriptive import of experimental philosophy with Carnapian
explication (See Koch 2019; Lindauer 2020; Nado 2021; Pinder
2017a, 2017b; Schubach 2017; Shepherd and Justus 2015). X-phi may
not only provide some descriptive basis for reshaping our thinking,
it may also provide some measurement and prescriptive guidance
for which options to choose on the basis of experimental data.
X-phi, therefore, would not only be one among many relevant
descriptive sources for conducting conceptual engineering, but
happens to play a central role throughout its successive
phases—roughly, description, evaluation, improvement, and
implementation (cf. Andow 2020).
A second example may be drawn from a possible empirical
challenge to the primitivist theory of truth according to which “the
concept of truth is fundamental: it is an explanatorily indispensable
concept that cannot be defined, analyzed, or otherwise explicated
in terms of concepts that are still more fundamental” (Asay 2021:
525). Perhaps the most effective argument for conceptual
primitivism is the omnipresence argument, which depends on the
concept of truth contributing to the structure of every
propositional thought. Asay gives us a clue as to where we might
look for a challenge to the omnipresence argument. In a telling
footnote, Asay writes:

[M]y view has empirical implications, in that it’s an empirical

matter as to which creatures possess which concepts. It’s not

17
 straightforward, however, that omnipresence can be directly
tested by empirical methods. The falsifier would be someone
who could assert, believe, and contemplate but didn’t possess
TRUTH. But there is no independent means of identifying who
possesses a certain concept in the absence of (philosophical)
views as to what it is to possess that concept” (Asay 2021:
537fn8)

There is no doubt that asserting, believing, and contemplating are

signs of advanced cognition. Additionally, understanding the
behavior of others in a wide variety of situations requires an
understanding of their psychological states. So, a critical marker of
advanced social cognition would be an understanding of false
beliefs. Nonverbal false-belief tests using active behavioral
measures have shown that by differing in their helping behaviors
infants, between 16- and 18-months old demonstrated their ability
to attribute different goals to an experimenter based on his true
versus false beliefs (Buttelmann et al. 2009). False-belief attribution
by human infants suggests that, while perhaps non-verbal, they
display behavior consistent with asserting, believing, or
contemplating what others believe or fail to believe. By Asay’s own
lights, then, it is a short step from here to the possession of TRUTH.
For infants, it seems reasonable to suppose that they assert,
believe, or contemplate some propositional content and possess
TRUTH, but we may not be compelled to allow such an inference to
go through for non-human animals, like apes, orangutans, or
chimpanzees. In a recent study, Buttelmann et al. (2017) show using
the new interactive behavioral infant false-belief test pioneered by
Buttelmann et al.(2009) that apes may have a basic understanding
of others’ false beliefs. The pattern of results was exactly the same

18
as those that they had found in their earlier study on 16-month-old
infants. While one may enthusiastically support the idea that an
infant possesses TRUTH, one may be more reluctant to ascribe the
possession of TRUTH to a non-human primate. Even philosophers
who are willing to accept that philosophy should be empirically
informed may be reluctant to accept such ascriptions because they
would not only have to ascribe TRUTH to apes but might also have to
accept that non-human animals are in possession of other
potentially primitive concepts, such as IDENTITY, EXISTENCE,

KNOWLEDGE, GOODNESS, BELIEF, ACTION, and CAUSE. Asay’s admission and

the presence of empirical data show how our judgments about
cases may be driven by our background empirical picture of the
world, and hence also be modified as that picture is updated.12

4.3 When empirical facts are evidence for a philosophical fact

A third instance of the inference from empirical to philosophical

facts includes cases where empirical facts are reasonably direct
evidence for corresponding philosophical facts, if perhaps only
defeasibly so. Think here of cases where a folk endorsement of a
claim can be taken as prima facie evidence that P itself is true. Thus,
philosophical theories that predict P gain an at least pro tanto
advantage over theories that do not have such evidential support.
The most obvious case of this sort is one in which there is a
widely and robustly held folk intuition that P. While it is easiest to
see this route in action in cases involving explicit avowals,
self-reports, or speech behaviors, more implicit folk endorsement,

12
For a more thorough examination of Asay’s proposal, see Ulatowski and Wyatt (Forthcoming).

19
revealed to be informing folk distinctions or decisions, could in
principle be fair game (cf. Kripke 1980: 42).13
We might think that human speech, cognition, or action
provide evidence for corresponding philosophical facts for reasons
other than that we expect the former to reliably track the latter.14
J.L. Austin, in his famous apologia for ordinary language
philosophy, promoted such a view:

[O]ur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions

men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they
have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many
generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous,
more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the
survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary
and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are
likely to think up in our armchairs of an a ernoon—the most
favoured alternative method. (Austin 1979: 182)

Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in

principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved
upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.
(Austin 1979: 185; italics original)

It is too bad that Austin did not consider the possibility of a more
experimentally ambitious set of methods, but he did not have a
favorable opinion of broadly experimental philosophical projects.
Austin believed that his ordinary language philosophy was

13
Kripke endorses a vague version of this idea, but he does not offer any sort of proposal as to why
such an evidential relation should obtain between the intuitiveness of a claim and the fact that the
claim is true. I would suggest that there is probably more than one story to tell here.
14
See Chapter 11 in this volume.

20
“superior” to Arne Næss’ empirical semantics: “[Austin] was careful
to distinguish the programme he had in mind from the kind of
Gallup-poll empirical teamwork which Næss believed in, and which
Austin regarded as, in principle, misguided” (Warnock 1969: 14n2).
Despite this, some recent work has extended Austin’s view to x-phi.
Eugen Fischer et al. (2021), for example, have reported that a
paradox of perception depends upon contextually inappropriate
stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and Hansen et al.
(2021), using corpus analysis, have shown that the meaning of
“know” is far more diverse than philosophers have discussed. 15
Similar metaphilosophical thinking emerged in other streams
of the analytic tradition. Working around the same time as Austin
was Rudolf Carnap (1955) on his notion of intensionality in natural
languages. A er providing a brief summary of an empirical
procedure for determining intensions, Carnap admits that one
could derive philosophically interesting facts about intension by
“testing hypotheses concerning intensions” (1955: 40). In a footnote,
Carnap writes:

[Arne Næss’ Interpretation and Preciseness] describes in detail

various procedures for testing hypotheses concerning the
synonymity of expressions with the help of questionnaires,
and gives examples of statistical results found with these
questionnaires. The practical difficulties and sources of
possible errors are carefully investigated. The procedures
concern the responses of the test persons, not to observed
objects as in the present paper, but to pairs of sentences
within specified contexts. Therefore the questions are

15
Despite the success of the Austinian program, there have been recent works that tend to oppose an
Austinian ordinary language approach (e.g., Baz 2018).

21
 formulated in the metalanguage, e.g., “Do the two given
sentences in the given context express the same assertion to
you?” Although there may be different opinions concerning
some features of the various procedures, it seems to me that
the book marks an important progress in the methodology of
empirical meaning analysis for natural languages. … The
book, both in its methodological discussions and in its reports
on experiences with the questionnaires, seems to me to
provide abundant evidence in support of the intensionalist
thesis. (Carnap 1955: 46n6)

That psychological facts are prima facie evidence for

philosophical facts may be traced to a great deal of the
experimental work completed since 2001. Many classic x-phi
papers can be seen as exemplifying this path—for example, the
experimental works on intentional action (Adams and Steadman
2004a, 2004b; Cushman 2007; Knobe 2003, 2004; Machery 2008;
Nichols and Ulatowski 2007; Paprzycka-Hausman 2015), on free
will and determinism (Nahmias et al. 2006; Nichols and Knobe
2007; Nichols and Roskies 2008), on epistemic intuitions (Feltz and
Zarpentine 2010; May et al. 2010; Sripada and Stanley 2012), or on
semantic intuitions (Næss 1938a, 1938b, 1953; Machery et al. 2004).
Of course, we need not restrict ourselves to inferences from
folk cognition to philosophical facts. One may extend the analysis to
include the behavior or cognition of a cognitively elite subset of
people, inferring from their behavior or cognition some
philosophically relevant truth. There are a range of ways in which a
group might plausibly be elite, in the sense that their psychology
on the whole may better reflect the relevant philosophical reality
than the psychology of humans in general; training (such as a

22
specialist education in the topic at hand) or cognitive traits (such as
being more reflective and thoughtful) are good candidates. There
are indeed some cases where non-philosophers are simply
ineligible for the task—there is little point in asking non-specialists
about, say, different physically or functionally reductive accounts of
what a gene is, or about the a priori/a posteriori distinction in those
terms. Outside of such truly and legitimately highfalutin tasks,
though, experimentalists would be better off pursuing parallel
research on both folk and putative elites, since the jury is still very
much out as to just which kinds of characteristics provide what
kind of improvements on which kinds of tasks.

4.4 When empirical facts just are philosophical facts

There are at least some questions of philosophical interest that are

themselves questions about human cognition and behavior.
Philosophers are legitimately interested in questions about, e.g.,
human nature, or the consequences of believing in hard
determinism, or what causal factors influence what sorts of
behaviors. Psychologists, of course, have an interest in the
behaviors that follow from one’s beliefs. These sorts of projects
highlight the overlap between psychology and
empirically-informed philosophy. Think here of the various results
on trolley cases obtained by philosophers and by psychologists (See
the contributions in Lillehammer Forthcoming). These sets of
results may be seen as continuous insofar as empirical
investigations are directly relevant to the philosophical debate.
The identity of empirical facts with philosophical facts is best
exemplified by the work of Eric Schwitzgebel and Matthew
Lindauer, along with their respective collaborators. Schwitzgebel
has explored whether moral reflection positively correlates with

23
moral behavior (for an overview, see Schwitzgebel and Rust 2012).
Intuitively, one would think that ethicists just are better people than
those who have not had professional training in ethics; however,
Schwitzgebel’s research has shown that relatively obscure,
contemporary ethics books likely borrowed by professors or
advanced students are about 50% more likely to be missing from
the university library than non-ethics books (Schwitzgebel 2009).
Moreover, he and his colleagues showed that ethicists did not
behave any more courteously than their non-ethicist colleagues at a
major philosophy conference (Schwitzgebel, et al. 2012).
Not all news emanating from Schwitzgebel’s lab is an
indictment of ethicists behaving badly. In a monumental recent
study co-authored with Bradford Cokelet and Peter Singer,
Schwitzgebel found using direct observational data that
extra-laboratory behavioral effects of university-level ethics
instruction. When students were exposed to a philosophy article, a
50-minute discussion section, and an optional video concerning
the ill-effects of eating factory farmed meat, students’ purchases of
meat of $4.99 or more at campus dining locations decreased by 7%
(Schwitzgebel, Cokelet, and Singer Forthcoming). X-phi on the
practical efficacy of different sorts of moral interventions appears
to be a growth field, in fact. For example, a recent study by
Buckland et al. (2021) has shown how students’ moral views on
global poverty have been affected by engaging with the arguments
of Peter Singer (1972) and others.

5. Conclusion

The move from empirical facts, including results from social and
cognitive psychology, linguistics, and x-phi, to philosophically
relevant consequences is an exercise in scientific practice. Engaging

24
in scientific practice means that one is willing to follow the
evidence where it leads, even if it leads away from one’s preferred
hypothesis. This is a sign of intellectual courage, and the four
approaches commonly undertaken by projects in experimental
philosophy exemplify this virtue.
X-phi’s main function is to bring empirical methods to bear
on philosophical questions. If this is correct, then x-phi is an
exercise in intellectual humility. When an experimental
philosopher is confronted with not knowing whether “anyone
would say y,” they take their ignorance to be an opportunity to find
out whether anyone would in fact say y. That one is ignorant of the
unanswered question causes one to experience excitement and
curiosity, recognizing that a new way of doing philosophy may
bring about the resolution of one’s ignorance. There is no shame in
not knowing something. When an intellectually humble person
realizes that they don’t know something, they admit as much and
then set about trying to acquire the knowledge that they need. This
is precisely the course that is followed by experimental
philosophers.
X-phi’s readiness to defer to the evidence is related to how
the scientific method may be a form of bias control. Scientists
understand that they are biased, so they put in place
methodological constraints to reduce the chance that they will be
tempted by hypotheses they wish were true, rather than ones that
are likely to be true. The goal is to be led by the evidence, including
evidence which shows that some experiment failed to replicate.
Even when we think that we have all the answers, there is still more
to be learned.16

16
I am grateful for extensive feedback on drafts of this chapter from Bob Barnard, Guiliano Gajetti,
Justine Kingsbury, Marcus Rossberg, Marek Sławiński, Szymon Sapalski, Jeremy Wyatt, and Jonathan
Weinberg.

25
26
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