Experimental Philosophy - Criticisms

Criticisms

In 2006, J. David Velleman attacked experimental philosophy on the blog Left2Right, prompting a response from its defenders on Brian Leiter's blog.

Antti Kauppinen (2007) has argued that intuitions will not reflect the content of folk concepts unless they are intuitions of competent concept users who reflect in ideal circumstances and whose judgments reflect the semantics of their concepts rather than pragmatic considerations. Experimental philosophers are aware of these concerns, and have in some cases explicitly argued against pragmatic explanations of the phenomena they study. In turn, Kauppinen has argued that any satisfactory way of ensuring his three conditions are met would involve dialogue with the subject that would be engaging in traditional philosophy.

Timothy Williamson (2008) has argued that we should not construe philosophical evidence as consisting of intuitions, and that such a conception rests on the "dialectical conception of evidence".

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