Experimental philosophy, an exciting new movement in contemporary Western philosophy, is what it sounds like — philosophers using scientific methods to design and run their own experiments on philosophically interesting topics.  The most common method thus far employed by philosophers is the survey. Experimental philosophers will take a familiar thought experiment, rewrite it to make it accessible to lay people, and collect and analyze the results. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that many of the intuitions of professional philosophers are not shared by everyone. To give just one example discussed in the new volume, evidence suggests that philosophers and ordinary people differ in their understanding of subjective experience, or consciousness.  As those familiar with philosophy of mind know, philosophers frequently use color as a paradigmatic example of conscious experience on par with being in pain, but the evidence collected by experimental philosophers suggests that ordinary people are less inclined to classify seeing color in the same way that they classify being in pain.

Given these kinds of findings, much of the work of the experimental philosophers is critical of the role intuitions have played in mainstream philosophy. Philosophers have historically relied on their intuitions both in building arguments and in articulating concepts; the underlying, and often unstated, assumption is that their own intuitions were generalizable. Experimental philosophy challenges this notion and in so doing brings to light serious methodological problems; examples of this critical attitude are found throughout the book. But the experimental philosophers are not merely critical; many of them have been using their experimental work in theory construction and much of this recent work is collected in this volume. Experimental philosophers use the results of their experiments to address issues of human nature, morality, knowledge, and decision-making, among other topics.

The second volume of the Experimental Philosophy series, edited, like the first volume, by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, picks up where the last volume stopped. The first volume covered articles published in experimental philosophy from 2001-2007.  The new volume covers material published since 2007. One difference between this volume and the first is the increased collaboration with scientists; many of the papers in the second volume are authored or co-authored with psychologists. Like the first volume, the previously published papers in this collection cover a wide range of topics and issues. This is both a strength and a weakness of the current volume. On the one hand, the collection showcases the breadth of work being done in experimental philosophy, but on the other, I found myself wishing for more depth and more interaction between the articles that make up the various sections.

The book is divided into five sections: Metaphilosophy, Consciousness, Metaethics, The Impact of Morality on Judgment, and Miscellaneous, with most sections consisting of three papers. The first section addresses some of the methodological issues that have arisen in the wake of experimental philosophy; the middle three sections each represent a research area where experimental philosophers have been especially active; and the final section includes three distinct topics — innateness, gender, and the differences between philosophers’ and non-philosophers’ intuitions.

The topics of the first section are quite disparate: a paper by a critic of experimental philosophy, Antti Kauppinen, which defends traditional methodologies; a paper by a group of experimental philosophers, Joshua Alexander, Ronald Mallon, and Jonathan Weinberg, who argue that the positive program of experimental philosophy faces the same problems as the more traditional methods; and a paper by the psychologist Jennifer Cole Wright, who presents the results of her work on the stability of intuitions. All three of these papers are excellent and raise interesting issues for the field; I understand why the editors chose them. Yet, it feels like a missed opportunity to explore a single issue in more depth. (In particular, it would be nice to see responses to the issues raised by Kauppinen.)

The section on Metaethics consists of just two papers that take up distinct positions on the question of whether ordinary people are objectivists about moral claims, that is, do ordinary people believe that there is a single, objective truth about claims like “hitting people because you feel like it is wrong” or do they believe that these claims are true only in relation to an individual or a culture. The first paper, by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley, presents evidence that ordinary people are objectivist about moral claims. In other words, if two people disagree about the claim “hitting people because you feel like it is wrong,” then at least one of them has to be wrong. This initial finding is in keeping with what philosophers had assumed about ordinary people’s beliefs.  In the second paper, Hagop Sarkissian and his colleagues challenge the idea that ordinary people are objectivist about moral claims. Following up on the work of Goodwin and Darley, Sarkissian et al argue that the matter is more complicated. They present work suggesting that when participants are exposed to alternative views they are more likely to endorse relativism about moral claims. Unlike the first section, in this section the second paper responds to and builds on the work from the first, which provides readers with a better sense of the complexities of the issues.

Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 is a good companion to Experimental Philosophy and I’d recommend it to anyone who has read the first volume. But if you are new to the field, I’d suggest reading the first volume before reading the second. As mentioned above, there is no introduction to the second volume; Knobe and Nichols direct the reader to an extensive introduction written for the first volume. Both volumes are accessible to the general reader and both offer a good introduction to a variety of the issues being explored by experimental philosophy.  A final note: these volumes are distinct from a series also edited by Knobe and Nichols, with Tania Lombrozo, Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, the first volume of which was published in 2014.

© 2015 Emily Esch

Emily Esch, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University