What Is "Experimental Philosophy"?
Appeals to intuition have been central to analytic philosophy since at least the 1970s. Epistemologists rely on our intuitive judgments about whether someone looking at a real barn in (unbeknownst to her) Fake Barn Country knows that it's a barn she's seeing. Ethicists rely on our intuitive judgments about whether it's wrong to push someone in front of a runaway streetcar, killing him in order to save five others. Philosophers of mind rely on our intuitions about whether a cleverly enough designed machine would be conscious.
Several years ago, a number of young philosophers decided they were fed up with philosophers' armchair claims about "our" intuitions (especially when those claims contradicted each other). Such claims are empirically testable, they said, so let's test them! Hence "experimental philosophy" as a movement was born.
Experimental philosophy, so conceived, is a coherent and interesting movement -- even if it's debatable exactly how much polls of undergraduates about philosophical puzzles really tell us about deep philosophical questions.
But then the question arises: Some philosophers have done experiments that aren't a matter of polling intuitions. Should they, too, be called "experimental philosophers"? It turns out there aren't many such philosophers, but I happen to be one (e.g., this and this and this and this and this).
The consensus seems to be that "experimental philosophy" should be construed broadly to include people like me -- to include, basically, any philosopher who does experiments with an eye to philosophical issues. I'm honored to join the party (and the society and the blog and everything else!), but I'm concerned about this characterization of experimental philosophy. What if a psychologist runs an experiment with an eye to philosophical issues (as many have done)?
For example, I've given people beepers and asked about their stream of consciousness, with an eye to issues about the basic structure and epistemology of our experience (critiquing Descartes and James and Dennett and Siewert and many other philosophers). A psychologist could have done exactly the same thing, though -- and many have done similar things. If we count all such psychologists as experimental philosophers, then the movement is too big and broad to be a coherent entity. On the other hand, if we count me but not those psychologists, then it's hard to see how "experimental philosophy" could be a subdiscipline or movement defined by a set of research questions and methods. Instead, it would have to be some sort of sociologically defined movement in which departmental affiliation plays a key role. But is that what we want?