Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science PDF
Preview Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science
Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science Advances in Experimental Philosophy Series Editor James Beebe, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, USA Editorial Board Joshua Knobe, Yale University, USA Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh, USA Thomas Nadelhoffer, College of Charleston, USA Eddy Nahmias, Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, USA Jennifer Nagel, University of Toronto, Canada Joshua Alexander, Siena College, USA Empirical and experimental philosophy is generating tremendous excitement, producing unexpected results that are challenging traditional philosophical methods. Advances in Experimental Philosophy responds to this trend, bringing together some of the most exciting voices in the field to understand the approach and measure its impact in contemporary philosophy. The result is a series that captures past and present developments and anticipates future research directions. To provide in-depth examinations, each volume links experimental philosophy to a key philosophical area. They provide historical overviews alongside case studies, reviews of current problems, and discussions of new directions. For upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and professionals actively pursuing research in experimental philosophy, these are essential resources. Titles in the series include Advances in Experimental Epistemology, edited by James R. Beebe Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology, edited by Hagop Sarkissian and Jennifer Cole Wright Advances in Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Methodology, edited by Jennifer Nado Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, edited by Florian Cova and Sébastien Réhault Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language, edited by Jussi Haukioja Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics, edited by Andrew Aberdein and Matthew Inglis Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Mind, edited by Justin Sytsma Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental Philosophy, edited by Helen De Cruz and Ryan Nichols Experimental Metaphysics, edited by David Rose Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, edited by Eugen Fischer and Mark Curtis Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science Edited by Daniel A. Wilkenfeld and Richard Samuels BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Daniel A. Wilkenfeld, Richard Samuels and Contributors 2019 Daniel A. Wilkenfeld, Richard Samuels have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design by Catherine Wood Cover photograph © Dieter Leistner / Gallerystock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilkenfeld, Daniel A., editor. | Samuels, Richard (Richard Ian), editor. Title: Advances in experimental philosophy of science / edited by Daniel A. Wilkenfeld and Richard Samuels. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Advances in experimental philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019021034 (print) | LCCN 2019022179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350068865 (hb: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Science–Philosophy. Classification: LCC Q175 .A2935 2019 (print) | LCC Q175 (ebook) | DDC 501–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021034 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022179 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6886-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6887-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-6888-9 Series: Advances in Experimental Philosophy Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents 1 Introduction Richard Samuels and Daniel Wilkenfeld 1 Part One Explanation and Understanding 2 Scientific Discovery and the Human Drive to Explain Elizabeth Kon and Tania Lombrozo 15 3 The Challenges and Benefits of Mechanistic Explanation in Folk Scientific Understanding Frank Keil 41 Part Two Theories and Theory Change 4 Information That Boosts Normative Global Warming Acceptance without Polarization: Toward J. S. Mill’s Political Ethology of National Character Michael Andrew Ranney, Matthew Shonman, Kyle Fricke, Lee Nevo Lamprey, and Paras Kumar 61 5 Doubly Counterintuitive: Cognitive Obstacles to the Discovery and the Learning of Scientific Ideas and Why They Often Differ Andrew Shtulman 97 6 Intuitive Epistemology: Children’s Theory of Evidence Mark Fedyk, Tamar Kushnir, and Fei Xu 122 Part Three Special Sciences 7 Applying Experimental Philosophy to Investigate Economic Concepts: Choice, Preference, and Nudge Michiru Nagatsu 147 8 Scientists’ Concepts of Innateness: Evolution or Attraction? Edouard Machery, Paul Griffiths, Stefan Linquist, and Karola Stotz 172 Part Four General Considerations 9 Causal Judgment: What Can Philosophy Learn from Experiment? What Can it Contribute to Experiment? James Woodward 205 List of Contributors 245 Index 249 vi 1 Introduction Richard Samuels and Daniel Wilkenfeld Introduction It is hard to think of any human endeavor more transformative in its effects than science. In the space of a few hundred years, it has generated dramatic improvements in our understanding of the universe and spawned a plethora of new technologies. It pervades almost every aspect of contemporary human life: our education, our daily decisions, our politics, even our sports and pastimes. It lies at the heart of our purest intellectual activities and our unparalleled ability to control the world around us. If one were to list the most distinctive and important of human activities, science would surely be among them. In view of this significance, it should be unsurprising that science itself has become an object of intensive enquiry. Thus, researchers from a broad array of different disciplines—including history, sociology, economics, psychology, and philosophy—have sought to understand various aspects of science. Further, over the past few decades, newly emerging interdisciplinary fields, such as science and technology studies (STS), have sought to integrate the deliverances of such research in pursuit of a more complete understanding of science. Though a detailed discussion of these various fields of research falls well beyond the scope of the present chapter, we do need to say more about the philosophy of science and its potential interconnections with the cognitive and behavioral sciences—especially psychology. Psychologists have long been interested in the sorts of cognitive activities central to science—explanation, reasoning, inductive learning, categorization, and concept formation, for example. Moreover, when psychologists study such phenomena, they typically deploy a standard battery of experimental methods. Similarly, philosophers of science have long been interested in questions about the nature of science, its 2 Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science practices, and its core concepts. And when philosophers of science address such issues, they too draw on their own battery of familiar methods—including, for example, the construction of arguments and counterexamples, the analysis of concepts, and, on occasion, the use of logics and formal models. Strikingly—and this is the departure point for the present volume—there is remarkably little systematic interaction between the philosophy of science and the sorts of experimental approaches to be found in psychology. A core assumption of the present volume is that this lack of interaction presents an intriguing opportunity for growth. Philosophical and psychological approaches to the study of science should interact in deeper, more systematic ways than they currently do. This volume is thus dedicated to exploring the prospects for an experimental philosophy of science—one that uses the empirical methods of psychology in order to help address questions in the philosophy of science. Experimental philosophy and philosophy of science The rarity with which experimental methods from psychology have been applied by philosophers of science is puzzling, given the recent impact of such methods on many other areas of philosophy. Epistemologists, for example, have become increasingly interested in experimentally investigating how such concepts as knowledge and justification are deployed in people’s explicit judgments (see, e.g., Beebe, 2014). Circumstances are similar in the philosophy of action, metaethics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and even some parts of metaphysics. In each of these fields, one finds a growing group of philosophers using experimental psychological techniques to help develop and assess accounts of philosophically significant concepts, such as reference, consciousness, and intention. (For recent reviews of such work, see Sytsma and Buckwalter, 2016.) Appropriately enough, the resulting approach has been dubbed experimental philosophy (Knobe et al., 2012). Though there are many reasons for this “experimental turn,” one highly influential consideration, widely associated with the so-called positive program, is to aid in what has long been a core philosophical activity—the analysis of philosophically important concepts (Knobe and Nichols, 2008). Ordinarily, when philosophers engage in conceptual analysis, they draw heavily on their own “intuitions” in order to assess proposals regarding the structure and content of the salient concepts. Experimental philosophers maintain that the use of empirical methods—applied to broad, (ideally) representative populations—can Introduction 3 make a substantial contribution to this project. In particular, they maintain that, by adopting this approach, [t]hey can avoid some of the idiosyncrasies, biases, and performance errors that are likely to confront philosophers who attend only to their own intuitions and the intuitions of a few professional colleagues who read the same journals and who may have prior commitments to theories about the concepts under analysis. (Stich and Tobia, 2016, p. 23) So construed, experimental philosophy might be viewed as an attempt to replace potentially idiosyncratic judgments with more thorough empirical research. What’s novel is that experimental philosophers propose that scientific standards ought to apply to philosophy as well. More specifically, they maintain that, to the extent that philosophical theories incur empirical commitments regarding people’s intuitions and other psychological states, philosophers should aspire to the same standards as scientists do. Given the careful attention that philosophers of science have paid to experimental methodology, one might have expected to find them at the forefront of this new development in philosophy. However, for reasons that are not immediately obvious (at least not to us), philosophers of science have been slow to employ experimental methods of any sort.1 Moreover, what work has been done is isolated and scattered. Thus, the primary goal of this volume is to bring together research that both explores and exemplifies the prospects for an experimental philosophy of science. What might experimental philosophy of science be? As we see it, the core idea behind experimental philosophy of science is to use empirical methods, typically drawn from the psychological sciences, to help investigate questions of the sort associated with the philosophy of science. This conception is, by design, ecumenical in a variety of ways. First, in our view, experimental philosophy of science is to be characterized in terms of subject matter and methodology and not in terms of who is doing the research. To be sure, there are “card-carrying” philosophers who engage in the sorts of research we have in mind. But it is at least as common to find professional scientists applying the methods of psychology to questions associated with the philosophy of science. In our view, these scientists are as much a part of experimental philosophy of science as any philosopher. Indeed, in view of the
The list of books you might like
