A convincing argument can change a discussant’s commitment regarding the acceptability of a claim, but the same effect can be achieved by examining evidence. Observing objects or events that count as evidence for or against the acceptability of a statement can change one’s commitment regarding that statement. If we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through argumentation, can we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through evidence? In this paper, we defend an affirmative answer. We introduce (...) and discuss the conceptual implications of evidentiary fallacies as fallacies committed when evidence is fabricated or suppressed during an attempt to resolve disagreement using proof. We then apply the notion of evidentiary fallacy to two real-life examples of mis-executed evidentiary procedures. We conclude that the notion of evidentiary fallacy can contribute to a more comprehensive fallacy theory and can foster new and broadly applicable critical skills. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to conflict are oriented towards establishing consensus, either in the form of a resolution of the conflict or in the form of an ‘agree-to-disagree’ standstill between the stakeholders. In this paper, we criticize these traditional approaches, each for specific reasons, and we propose and develop the agonistic approach to conflict. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, the agonistic approach to conflict is more welcoming of dissensus, replacing discussion stoppers with discussion starters and replacing standstills with contestation. We (...) illustrate such replacements and develop this approach, we analyse technological conflicts in a concrete R&D setting: the global hydrogen economy. From this context, we focus on the conflict between the proponents of blue hydrogen and those of green hydrogen. We conclude by highlighting the advantage of the agonistic approach but also drawing attention to its own specific risk, namely, antagonism. (shrink)

What does it mean to be irresponsible in developing or using a technology? There are two fundamentally different answers to this question and they each generate research strands that differ in scope, style and applicability. To capture this difference, I make use of two mythical creatures of Jewish origin that have been employed in the past to represent relationships between man and man-made entities: the Golem (Collins and Pinch, 2002, 2005 ) and the Leviathan (Hobbes, 1994 ). The Golem is (...) the traditional image of technology as a creature that can be helpful but needs to be controlled. Irresponsibility in this perspective is the failure to exercise control. The Leviathan is the image of technology as a difficult compromise between fundamental values. Irresponsibility is in this perspective is allowing some values to systematically dominate others. Having worked out the basics of these images, I show that each comes with its specific methodological challenges: where the Golem gives rise to the Collingridge Dilemma of control, the Leviathan gives rise to Münchhausen’s trilemma of justification. Since the Golem image is predominant in scholarship on irresponsibility, I conclude with an appeal for a more equal distribution of efforts in conceptualizing technologies as Golems and as Leviathans. (shrink)

Disagreements come in all shapes and sizes, but epistemologists and argumentation theorists have singled out a special category referred to as deep disagreements. These deep disagreements are thought to pose philosophical and practical difficulties pertaining to their rational resolution. In this paper, I start with a critique of the widespread claim that deep disagreements are qualitatively different from normal disagreements because they arise from a difference in ‘fundamental principles’ or ‘hinge commitments.’ I then defend the following two claims: All disagreements (...) are deep to the extent that they are actual disagreements. This first claim implies, I will argue, that disagreements typically regarded as normal can be explained away as misunderstandings or communicative mishaps. The resolution of a disagreement can be rational either through a joint experience of mutually recognized facts or through an exchange of arguments that leads to a reformulation of the disagreement that, in this new form, lends itself to a resolution through a joint experience of mutually recognized facts. I conclude with a reflection on the consequences of these two theses for the idea of deep disagreement and that of rational resolution. (shrink)

Anticipating the ethical impact of emerging technologies is an essential part of responsible innovation. One such emergent technology is the digital twin which we define here as a living replica of a physical system. A digital twin combines various emerging technologies such as AI, Internet of Things, big data and robotics, each component bringing its own socio-ethical issues to the resulting artefacts. The question thus arises which of these socio-ethical themes surface in the process and how they are perceived by (...) stakeholders in the field. In this report we present the results of a qualitative study into the socio-ethical benefits and socio-ethical risks of using digital twins in healthcare. Employing insights from ethics of technology and the Quadruple Helix theory of innovation, we conducted desk research of white literature and 23 interviews with representatives from the four helixes: industry, research, policy and civil society. The ethical scan revealed several important areas where the digital twin can produce socio-ethical value but also several important areas of socio-ethical risks. We conclude with a reflection on the employed analytical tool and suggestions for further research. (shrink)

In this paper I develop and defend a form of argumentative normativity that is not based on fundamental principles. I first argue that research agendas that aim to discover fundamental principles of ‘good’ argumentative discourse share one crucial weak spot, viz. circularity. I then argue that this weak spot can be avoided in a pancritical view of normativity.

What does it mean to convince? In the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, convincing is done by arguments. The perlocutionary act of convincing is fundamentally related to the illocutionary act of arguing. I propose a critical reassessment of this relationship. The arguing-convincing pair presents conceptual difficulties, I argue, both in the pragmatic description based on felicity conditions and in the dialectical one based on intersubjective procedures. To tackle these problems, I develop a proposal that takes the speakers’ non-verbal interaction with evidence, (...) as opposed to their verbal interaction with one another, as the basis for understanding the resolution of differences of opinion. The proposal is compatible with the pragma-dialectical theory, provided some methodological adjustments are conceded. (shrink)

The inclusion of stakeholders in science is one of the core ideas in the field of responsible innovation. Conspiracists, however, are not your garden-variety stakeholders. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the conflict between conspiracists and science is deep and intractable. In this paper, we ask how the game of responsible innovation can be played with those who believe that the game is rigged. Understanding the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation is necessary in order to understand the unvisited corners (...) of the science-society interface in the post-pandemic future. We claim that pluralism, already part of the philosophical background that spurred responsible innovation, can offer insights into how conspiracism can be approached. As a case in point, we develop these insights starting from the policy on conspiracism developed in 2021 by the European Commission. We show that the ideal of inclusion can only be extended to conspiracists by accepting a pluralist framework, and we explain this pluralist response. (shrink)

Anticipating the ethical impact of emerging technologies is an essential part of responsible innovation. One such emergent technology is the digital twin which we define here as a living replica of a physical system (human or non-human). A digital twin combines various emerging technologies such as AI, Internet of Things, big data and robotics, each component bringing its own socio-ethical issues to the resulting artefacts. The question thus arises which of these socio-ethical themes surface in the process and how they (...) are perceived by stakeholders in the field. In this report we present the results of a qualitative study into the socio-ethical benefits and socio-ethical risks of using digital twins in healthcare. Employing insights from ethics of technology and the Quadruple Helix theory of innovation, we conducted desk research of white literature and 23 interviews with representatives from the four helixes: industry, research, policy and civil society. The ethical scan revealed several important areas where the digital twin can produce socio-ethical value (e.g., prevention and treatment of disease, cost reduction, patient autonomy and freedom, equal treatment) but also several important areas of socio-ethical risks (e.g., privacy and property of data, disruption of existing societal structures, inequality and injustice). We conclude with a reflection on the employed analytical tool and suggestions for further research. (shrink)

When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as ‘path creation’. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting strategies employed by supporters of emerging technologies in the field of solar fuels, particularly the advocates of a technology referred to as ‘artificial photosynthesis’. (...) For illustrative purposes we explore four such strategies: revisiting weak spots, resizing the problem, redefining the game, and renegotiating labels. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the empirical study of discursive strategies in a socio-technical system. We further suggest a more systematic application of discourse-analytical and argumentation-theoretical insights that can complement current scholarship on path dependence and path creation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Fallacies are traditionally defined as potentially deceptive failures of rationality or reasonableness. Fallacy theories seek to model this failure by formulating standards of rationality or reasonableness that arguers must observe when engaging in argumentative interaction. Yet it remains relatively easy to reject or avoid fallacy judgments even in the most clear-cut cases. In this article, I argue for a pluralist approach to criticism in which the fallacy accusation is only the starting point for a more complex form of criticism. (...) In a pluralist approach, the identification of fallacies works as a first step precisely because it can be so easily set aside. In doing so, the evaluator seeks other evaluative angles that depart from the original one. As a case in point, I exemplify the approach on a piece of argumentative discourse in the scientific context. I conclude by spelling out some of the methodological consequences of the present approach. (shrink)

Responsible innovation is centered around the ideal that societal stakeholders are entitled to participate in scientific and technological decision-making by voicing their needs and worries. Individuals who believe in science conspiracies (referred to here as ‘science conspiracists’) pose a challenge to implementing this ideal because it is not clear under what conditions their inclusion in responsible innovation exercises is possible and advisable. Yet precisely because of this uncertain status, science conspiracists constitute an instructive case in point to travel towards the (...) edges of inclusion and understand how we draw the line between ‘includables' and ‘unincludables’. In this paper, we seek to explore this relationship between responsible innovation and science conspiracism by using the method of thought experimentaiton. We test four possible exclusion criteria for science conspiracists. We conclude by revisiting the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation and sketching a novel perspective on the ideal of stakeholder inclusion. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of appearance in Husserl’s theory of knowledge, stressing its importance and its necessity. Far from being an accident that clarity, evidence or reality can evacuate, appearance is constitutive of our experience and of our approach of its grounding principles. In the light of this idea of appearance, the contingent aspects of our lived experience become an expression of the sense-formation process supporting and transforming it. This paper is a contribution to a larger discussion – including, (...) among others, Eugen Fink, Michel Henry and Jean-Paul Sartre – about the relationship between phenomenology and ontology, about the nature of our knowledge and our experience of freedom. (shrink)

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide (...) by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

We examine conditions under which, in a computable topological space, a semicomputable set is computable. It is known that in a computable metric space a semicomputable set S is computable if S is a continuum chainable from a to b, where a and b are computable points, or S is a circularly chainable continuum which is not chainable. We prove that this result holds in any computable topological space.

"Ronald Bruzina’s superb translation... makes available in English a text of singular historical and systematic importance for phenomenology." —Husserl Studies "... a pivotal document in the development of phenomenology... essential reading for students of phenomenology twentieth-century thought." —Word Trade "... an invaluable addition to the corpus of Husserl scholarship. More than simply a scholarly treatise, however, it is the result of Fink’s collaboration with Husserl during the last ten years of Husserl’s life.... This truly essential work in phenomenology should find (...) a prominent place alongside Husserl’s own works. For readers interested in phenomenology—and in Husserl in particular—it cannot be recommended highly enough." —Choice "... a thorough critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology... raises many new questions.... a classic." —J. N. Mohanty A foundational text in Husserlian phenomenology, written in 1932 and now available in English for the first time. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This (...) paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the main (...) objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

The paper outlines the evolution of on-going meta-philosophical debates about intuitions, explains different notions of 'intuition' employed in these debates, and argues for the philosophical relevance of intuitions in an aetiological sense taken from cognitive psychology. On this basis, it advocates a new kind of methodological naturalism which it finds implicit, for instance, in the warrant project in experimental philosophy: a meta-philosophical naturalism that promotes the use of scientific methods in meta-philosophical investigations. This 'higher-order' naturalism is consistent with both methodological (...) naturalism and methodological rationalism about first-order philosophy, and can help us adjudicate between the two, in a piecemeal manner. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

_Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy_ provides new foundations and methods for the revolutionary project of philosophical therapy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book vindicates this currently much-discussed project by reconstructing the genesis of important philosophical problems: With the help of concepts adapted from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book analyses how philosophical reflection is shaped by pictures and metaphors we are not aware of employing and are prone to misapply. Through innovative case-studies on the genesis of classical problems about (...) the mind and perception, and on thinkers including Locke, Berkeley and Ayer, the book demonstrates how such autonomous habits of thought systematically generate unsound intuitions and philosophical delusions, whose clash with reality, or among each other, gives rise to ill-motivated but maddening problems. The book re-examines models of therapeutic philosophy, due to Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and develops an approach that may let us overcome philosophical delusions and the problems they engender. In this way, the book explains where and why therapy in called for in philosophy, and develops techniques to carry it out. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

How is it that speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences they have never encountered before? - the 'problem of linguistic creativity' posed by this question is a core problem of both philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, and has sparked off a considerable amount of work in the philosophy of mind. The book establishes the failure of the familiar - compositional - approach to this problem, and then takes a radically new start: It (...) develops core elements of the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, and puts them to work to 'dissolve' the problem to prove it ill-framed by clarifying the questions posing it and breaking the spell of mistaken analogies informing it. This sharply focused monograph thus copes with a crucial problem that turns out to be a lot tougher than generally thought, and presents a precise and rigorous demonstration of an unfamiliar and exciting philosophical approach. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy is one of the most exciting and controversial philosophical movements today. This book explores how it is reshaping thought about philosophical method. Experimental philosophy imports experimental methods and findings from psychology into philosophy. These fresh resources can be used to develop and defend both armchair methods and naturalist approaches, on an empirical basis. This outstanding collection brings together leading proponents of this new meta-philosophical naturalism, from within and beyond experimental philosophy. They explore how the empirical study of philosophically (...) relevant intuition and cognition transforms traditional philosophical approaches and facilitates fresh ones. Part One examines important uses of traditional "armchair" methods which are not threatened by experimental work and develops empirically informed accounts of such methods that can potentially stand up to experimental scrutiny. Part Two analyses different uses and rationales of experimental methods in several areas of philosophy and addresses the key methodological challenges to experimental philosophy: Do its experiments target the intuitions that matter in philosophy? And how can they support conclusions about the rights and wrongs of philosophical views? Essential reading for students of experimental philosophy and metaphilosophy, _Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism_ will also interest students and researchers in related areas such as epistemology and the philosophies of language, perception, mind and action, science and psychology. (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...) fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

În acest capitol prezint neutralismul liberal urmând, în esență, patru pași. Încep cu definirea neutralismului și cu unele precizări și explicații importante pentru înțelegerea adecvată a susținerii lui fundamentale. Al doilea pas este dedicat evidențierii și explicării celor mai importante argumente neutraliste. Mă concentrez apoi asupra caracterizării principalelor versiuni ale acestei teorii politice și a reliefării argumentelor pe baza cărora se legitimează ele. În sfârșit, într-un ultim pas, expun obiecțiile sau argumentele anti-neutraliste și – totodată – replicile neutraliștilor liberali la (...) ele. Și de această dată este vorba, trebuie să precizez, doar despre obiecțiile cele mai importante (și mai „rezonabile”), nu despre toate obiecțiile, mai mult sau mai puțin plauzibile, care au fost aduse neutralismului de criticii săi. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

The paper is an intervention in the dispute about the moralism of the recent realist trend in political philosophy. It is particularly focused on analysing the debate on this subject between Niklas Erman and Eva Möller (2015a; 2015b) and Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi (2015a; 2015b). Examining the main arguments of both parties, I argue that realists (i.e., Jubb and Rossi) lost the debate, that realism is, in fact, moralism in disguise, and that its main methodological request – giving up (...) „pre-political” moral principles and values in political philosophy – is „unrealistic” (i.e., unfeasible). (shrink)