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A New Role for Experimental Work in Metaphysics

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Abstract

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to traditional philosophical debates.

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Notes

  1. Depending on the stage of theory development, the ontologist may also examine ordinary or “folk” concepts as well as more philosophical concepts. In some cases the point of conducting this preliminary analysis of our concepts is simply to ensure that we are clear about the topic of discussion.

  2. Here I am using terms based on Choi and Scholl (2006).

  3. To its credit, much recent work on causal modeling engages explicitly with empirical research. But it isn’t ontology as I’ve described it—it isn’t even reductive—and so it isn’t the sort of work I’m targeting. A quote from Alison Gopnik (2007) can help us to see the contrast between the approaches to causation. “…causal graphical models are to causation as geometry is to space. Rather than providing a reductive definition of causation they instead provide a formal mathematical framework that captures important regularities in causal facts, just as the mathematical structure of geometry captures important spatial regularities” (p. 3).

  4. Tania Lombrozo (under review) has done some interesting experimental work on the complex causal cases that philosophers describe as “double prevention.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    L. A. Paul

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  1. L. A. Paul
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Correspondence to L. A. Paul.

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Thanks to Joshua Knobe for helpful discussion.

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Paul, L.A. A New Role for Experimental Work in Metaphysics. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 461–476 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0034-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0034-z

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