Standing Up for Philosophy: Armchairs, Experiments, and the Case for Methodological Reform

In Standing up for Philosophy, Jonathan Weinberg and Joshua Alexander seek to radically reformulate the debate over armchair philosophy. Have results in experimental philosophy shown thought-experiments to be so problematic that they should be abandoned? While experimental philosophy seems to indicate that our verdicts on thought-experiments are vulnerable to demographic variation and unconscious contextual influences, philosophers have long struggled to articulate the pessimistic upshot from these vulnerabilities to error.

Weinberg and Alexander argue that these debates have been misframed in traditional epistemic terminology, such as whether the method of cases is sufficiently reliable to provide knowledge. The trouble with this framework is that it can’t reckon with experimental philosophy’s dirty little secret-namely, that the method of cases is probably not in such a bad way that it can’t sometimes be put to good use somewhere and somehow. The real question is not ’what’s so wrong with the method of cases that we shouldn’t use it at all?’ but ’what methodological advantages can experimental philosophy bring to the method of cases, that can’t be gained while we remain seated in our philosophical armchairs?’

Answering this requires us to turn our attention from questions of epistemic normativity to questions of methodological rationality. When philosophers start engaging seriously with the ways in which experimental methods can augment more traditional philosophical methods, we can hope for real philosophical progress. Weinberg and Alexander demonstrate that this is what standing up for philosophy is all about: giving ourselves a richer set of methodological resources that can be used to answer the kinds of questions that philosophers have been interested in asking all along.

Joshua Alexander, Professor of Philosophy, Siena College, Jonathan M. Weinberg, Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona

Jonathan M. Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he is also a member of the cognitive science program. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Rutgers University in 2002, and taught at Indiana University from 2001-2011 before moving to the University of Arizona.

Joshua Alexander is a Professor of Philosophy at Siena College, where he has been teaching since 2008. He earned an MA in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1999 and a PhD in Philosophy from Indiana University in 2008, and is a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.