Experimental Philosophy

Books

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The Identities of Action: How the Moral Valence of Consequences of Action Influence How We Distinguish Between Them

(Bloomsbury Publishers, 2025)

 

This book uses illustrative examples to show how the normative valence of the consequences of actions shapes our views of action individuation and that how we distinguish between actions has practical and philosophical import.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Where Action Meets Experiment

Chapter 2: Why Care About Individuating Action?

Chapter 3: Invariantist Accounts of Action Individuation

Chapter 4: Experimenting on Action and Action Individuation

Chapter 5: Practical Normative Evaluation and Action Individuation

Chapter 6: Is Action Individuation Relevant, Theoretically or Practically?

Commonsense Pluralism about Truth: An Empirical Defence

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

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Truth is a pervasive feature of ordinary language, deserving of systematic study, and few theorists of truth have endeavoured to chronicle the tousled conceptual terrain forming the non-philosopher’s ordinary view. In this book, the author recasts the philosophical treatment of truth in light of historical and recent work in experimental philosophy. He argues that the commonsense view of truth is deeply fragmented along two axes, across different linguistic discourses and among different demographics, termed in the book as endoxic alethic pluralism. To defend this view, four conclusions must be reached: (1) endoxic alethic pluralism should be compatible with how the everyday person uses truth, (2) the common conception of truth should be derivable from empirical data, (3) this descriptive metaphysical project is one aspect of a normative theory of truth, and (4) endoxic alethic pluralism is at least partially immune to challenges facing the ecological method in experimental philosophy and alethic pluralism.

Edited Collection 

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Experimental Philosophy and Corpus Analysis

(Bloomsbury, 2026)

Editors: Joseph Ulatowski, Dan Weijers, and Justin Sytsma

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This collection includes twelve state-of-the-art contributions to experimental philosophy that use “real world” linguistic data from corpus linguistics to inform philosophical debates.

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Philosophers commonly make claims about words or the concepts they are taken to express. Often the focus is “ordinary” words or concepts but rarely do they formally engage with how language is used in a natural setting. Corpus analysis offers an exciting new opportunity to collect and analyse existing, “real world” linguistic data (Biber et al. 1998, McCarthy and O’Keefe 2010, McEnery and Wilson 2001), free of encumbrances found in standard experimental contexts, including the risk of introducing experimental artifacts. This area offers an array of methods for making use of corpora—curated collections of written or oral texts that aim to give a balanced and representative picture of the target domain of language use. The corpus might be relatively general, such as the British National Corpus, or a set of articles from specific disciplines, texts from certain time periods, or the utterances of children, and so on. In addition, corpora often include further information, such as the base form of the words, part-of-speech tagging, robust parsing, term and name identification, morphological analysis, anaphora resolution, or syntactic structure, as well as various types of metadata, such as the source of the text or the age of the person making the utterance.

Articles / Chapters

 

Looking Across Languages: Anglocentrism, Cross-Linguistic Experimental Philosophy, and the Future of Inquiry about Truth

Asian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming): 1-25

with Jeremy Wyatt

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Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.

Experimental Philosophy

In The Cambridge Handbook of Analytical Philosophy, edited by Marcus Rossberg, pp. 32-53 (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

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There are surprisingly many different methods that a project in analytic philosophy may employ to address perennial philosophical problems. 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. 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 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.

From Infants to Great Apes: The Empirical Adequacy of Primitivism about Truth

In Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, edited by David Bordonaba-Plou (Springer, 2023), pp. 263-286.

with Jeremy Wyatt

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There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these false-belief data to bear on Asay’s form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures.

Taste Predicates and Retraction Data: An Improved Framework

In Rertraction Matters: New Developments in the Philosophy of Language, edited by Dan Zeman and M. Hînchu (Springer, 2023), pp. 19-40.

with Jeremy Wyatt

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Over the past 20 years, predicates of personal taste (PPT) have been at he centre of a set of lively debates in the philosophy of language and linguistics. hese debates have yielded many subtle and inventive analyses of PPT. There is, however, a crucial methodological question about PPT that remains underexplored: what sorts of evidence should be used in evaluating an account of PPT? In line with a fairly large body of recent work, we point out that since hypotheses about PPT are empirical, they need to be evaluated empirically, using clearly articulated tests. The test on which we focus involves ordinary speakers’ judgments about retraction. We identify what we take to be two significant problems with the leading account, due to John MacFarlane, of why retraction data matter in the PPT debates. We then develop an improved framework for thinking about this issue. To close, we use our improved framework to re-evaluate the findings on retraction reported by Markus Kneer, and we discuss a few loose ends that will need to be addressed by future experimental research on PPT.

All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy

In Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, edited by Stephan Kornmasser and Max Bauer (de Gruyter, 2023), pp. 9-38.

with Chad Gonnerman and Justin Sytsma

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Experimental philosophy (or“x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is“traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 1.2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 1.3), to the early moderns (Section 1.4), to the late moderns (Section 1.5), and on to the present (Section 1.6).

Horwich's Epistemological Fundamentality and Folk Commitments

Axiomathes (2022) 32.Suppl 2: S575-S592.

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There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: ⟨p⟩ is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosophers talk about truth and how they judge that a sentence is true, a significant amount of data collected over the years reveal that the ordinary or folk view of truth is compatible with the epistemological fundamentality of alethic minimalism. This, I take it, suggests that people share in the same intuitions that form the bedrock of Horwich’s minimalism.

The Objectivity of Truth, A Core Truism?

Synthese (2021) 198.Suppl 2: S717-S733.

with Robert Barnard

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The familiar principle that: “truth is objective” can be understood in several ways. According to one interpretation of truth’s objectivity, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how some individual or some community understands it to be. Our project employs empirical studies to elicit people’s responses to questions about the objectivity of truth. These studies suggest the following: (1) overall, individuals tend to endorse claims that are consistent with the objectivity of truth; (2) individuals’ conceptions of the objectivity of truth can be importantly different from one another; (3) philosophers and non-philosophers both endorse the objectivity of truth, but the apparent commitment of philosophers is stronger.

The Fourfold Route to Empirical Enlightenment: Experimental Philosophy's Adolescence and the Changing Body of Work

Filozofia Nauki (2021) 29.2: 77-113.

with Robert Barnard

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The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the ‘fourfold route’. We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself.

Do People Really Think That ⸢φ⸣ is true if and only if φ?

In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics (Bloomsbury, 2019), edited by Andrew Aberdein, pp. 145-172

with Robert Barnard

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Tarski’s distillation of a rigorous account of truth into a system that turns on the acceptance of the so called Convention-T and its various instances has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analyzed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were practical variants of expressions of the form: ⸢φ⸣ is true if and only if φ.  This paper calls attention not only to Næss’ early findings but to a series of experimental results we’ve collected that suggest people respond affirmatively to the synonymy of a statement and its alethically quantified counterpart when the statement has content, but people are reluctant to do affirm the generalization from instances to a more abstract rendering that includes free variables.

Is There a Commonsense Conception of Truth?

Philosophia (2018) 46.2: 487-500.

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Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were practical variants of expressions of the form Bp’ is true if and only if p’. This paper calls attention to a series of experimental results Næss overlooked in his original study. These data collectively suggest that acceptance of expressions of the form Bp’ is true if and only if p’ varies according to what kind of statement p is.

Thinking about the Liar, Fast and Slow

In Reflections on the Liar, edited by Bradley Armour-Garb (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 204-250.

with Robert Barnard and Jonathan Weinberg

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The liar paradox is widely conceived as a problem for logic and semantics. On the basis of empirical studies presented here, we suggest that there is an underappreciated psychological dimension to the liar paradox and related problems, conceived as a problem for human thinkers. Specific findings suggest that how one interprets the liar sentence and similar paradoxes can vary in relation to one’s capacity for logical and reflective thought, acceptance of certain logical principles, and degree of philosophical training, but also as a function of factors such as religious belief, gender, and whether the problem is treated as theoretical or practical. Though preliminary, these findings suggest that one reason the liar paradox resists a final resolution is that it engages both aspects described by so-called dual process accounts of human cognition.

Ordinary Truth in Tarski and Næss

In Uncovering Facts and Values, edited by Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska and Adrian Kuźniar. (Brill Publishers, 2016), pp. 67-90.

 

Alfred Tarski seems to endorse a partial conception of truth, the T-schema, which he believes might be clarified by the application of empirical methods, specifically citing the experimental results of Arne Næss (1938a). The aim of this paper is to argue that Næss’ empirical work confirmed Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, among others. In the first part, I lay out the case for believing that Tarski’s T-schema, while not the formal and generalizable Convention-T, provides a partial account of truth that may be buttressed by an examination of the ordinary person’s views of truth. Then, I address a concern raised by Tarski’s contemporaries who saw Næss’ results as refuting Tarski’s semantic conception. Following that, I summarize Næss’ results. Finally, I will contend with a few objections that suggest a strict interpretation of Næss’ results might recommend an overturning of Tarski’s theory.

Tarski's 1944 Polemical Remarks and Næss' 'Experimental Philosophy'

Erkenntnis (2016) 81.3: 350-382

with Robert Barnard

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Tarski identifies two primary conditions for a successful definition of truth: formal correctness and material (or intuitive) adequacy. Material adequacy requires that the concept expressed by the formal definition capture the intuitive content of truth. Our primary interest in this paper is to better understand Tarski's thinking about material adequacy, and whether components of his view developed over time. More precisely, we are concerned with how Tarski's understanding of the content of the common-sense, every-day usage of truth may have developed over time. We distinguish this concern from the character of the extensional criterion of adequacy Tarski proposes: that a materially adequate definition must entail all instances of Convention T. We will develop our reading of Tarski as follows: first, we will review the "Polemical Remarks," focusing primarily on §§14 and 17, and Tarski's references to Naess' empirical research. Next, we will provide a summary and discussion of Naess' work, especially his findings with respect to Tarski's definition of truth and his research that suggests there is no single common or everyday concept of truth. Third, we will consider several possible objections to our interpretation of the Tarski-Naess dialectic. We will conclude that Tarski's conception of what the material adequacy requirement develop over time, potentially because of what he had learned through his interactions with Naess.

On the Expertise Defense Against Experimental Philosophy

Southwest Philosophical Studies (2015) 36: 71-77.

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There has been a recent effort to defend traditional armchair methods of philosophizing using what has been called an “expertise defense.” According to this view, only specially trained persons have philosophically relevant intuitions. In this paper I explore two versions of the expertise defense, one by Gary Gutting and the other by Timothy Williamson. §2 explains how philosophers appeal to intuitions. §3 will review the expertise defense of Gutting and Williamson. §4 argues that not only is the expertise defense susceptible to the problems commonly leveled against it but that it succumbs to a modified Euthyphro dilemma. Finally, in §5, I conclude that neither Gutting’s nor Williamson’s version of the expertise defense is able to circumvent the dilemma. So, at least according to these two defenses, the expertise defense is bogus.

Truth, Correspondence, and Gender

Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2013) 4.4: 621-638

with Robert Barnard

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Philosophical theorizing about truth manifests a desire to conform to the ordinary or folk notion of truth.  This practice often involves attempts to accommodate some form of correspondence.  We discuss this accommodation project in light of two empirical projects intended to describe the content of the ordinary conception of truth.  One, due to Arne Naess, claims that the ordinary conception of truth is not correspondence. Our more recent study is consistent with Naess’ result.  Our findings suggest that contextual factors and respondent gender affect whether the folk accept that correspondence is sufficient for truth.  These findings seem to show that the project of accommodating the ordinary notion of truth is more difficult than philosophers had anticipated because it is fragmentary.

Act Individuation: An Experimental Approach

Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2012) 3.2: 249-262.

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Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies invariantly seems mistaken.

Fixing the Default Position in Knobe's Competence Model

Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2010) 33.4: 352-353.

with Justus Johnson

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Although we agree with the spirit of Knobe's competence model, our aim in this commentary is to argue that the default position should be made more precise. Our quibble with Knobe's model is that we find it hard to ascribe a coherent view to some experimental subjects if the default position is not clearly defined.

Intuitions and Individual Differences: The Knobe Effect Revisited

Mind and Language (2007) 22.4: 346-365.

with Shaun Nichols

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Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how ‘intentional’ is interpreted. That is, in Knobe’s cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of ‘intentional’ opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe’s results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the use of intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern.

A Conscientious Resolution of the Action Paradox on Buridan's Bridge

Southwest Philosophical Studies (2003) 25: 85-94.

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Let us suppose that a bridge spans the width of a river connecting two separate lands. Plato and a few of his cronies stand guard at one end of the bridge. No one can cross the bridge without his assent. Socrates arrives at the bridge and pleads with great supplication for Plato to let him cross. Plato flies into a rage and swears an oath in these terms: "Surely, Socrates, if in the first proposition which you utter, you speak the truth, I will permit you to cross. But surely, if you speak falsely, I shall throw you in the water." Socrates replies, "You will throw me into the water." The dilemma is that if Plato throws Socrates in the water, then the first proposition Socrates uttered was true, in which case, to keep his promise, Plato should instead have let him freely pass. If Plato allows Socrates to cross, then the first proposition Socrates uttered was false, so that in accord with his vow, Plato should instead have thrown him in the water. This is the paradox of Buridan's Bridge. The paradox raises the question: "What ought Plato do to keep his promise?" The aim of this paper is to offer a critical assessment of Buridan's proposed solution to the bridge keeper paradox. First, I will outline his proposed solution to the paradox, and, second, carefully analyze each issue mentioned in the proposed solution. Finally, I will attempt to conclude that Buridan has implicitly accepted a three-valued logic that does not allow him to conclude that Plato ought not do anything.