Talk:Experimental philosophy

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Burning Amrchair Image[edit]

The image of the burning armchair is widely agreed among experimental philosophers to not be some official logo or symbol of x-phi. It's merely for fun. (See this post and the comments following it, for example: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2009/05/on-the-burning-armchair.html) A previous version of this entry wrote that the burning armchair illustrates the difference between x-phi and armchair philosophy. No, it doesn't. Experimental philosophy needn't be hostile toward the armchair method as the burning of an armchair suggests. In describing x-phi in an encyclopedia entry that is supposed to be professional, I see no need to even mention images. - Jaymay (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Improvement[edit]

•This is a subject deserving of a much more in-depth article. If it is not marked for improvement I'll attempt to make some preliminary expansions. --69.246.166.61 13:45, 25 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. As an interested non philosopher, I was disappointed to find no occurrences on the Wikipedia of X-phi. --Eddie | Talk 09:20, 12 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]


•This page makes no sense, though I cannot say if that is due to Wikipedia editors or experimental philosophy itself. My primary concern is that it seems to treat what constitutes analytic philosophy differently in each paragraph. The term itself can refer to the heavily linguistic philosophy of the early 20th century (linguistic analysis), the Anglo-American style of philosophy after Kant (conceptual analysis), or even the sort of rigorous philosophy done in academia at present (argument analysis). Furthermore, the traditional "analytic/continental" divide collapsed prior to the advent of experimental philosophy, again making the intended target confusing. Finally, analytic philosophy -- in all its referable forms -- is specifically known for its rigor and willingness to incorporate scientific data. What, then, is experimental philosophy? 128.143.97.208 (talk) 16:48, 27 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]


•This page does not appropriately utilize any terminology used in the field of philosophy, especially the term "analytic". I attempted to mark all the statements needing citations (of which there were many) but it was difficult because much of the language is not encyclopedic and quite difficult to understand.75.210.183.226 (talk) 09:26, 7 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]


Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference

While the philosophical movement Experimental Philosophy began around 2000, the use of empirical methods in philosophy far predates the emergence of the recent academic field.

Passages such as the above perpetuate the inaccurate and increasingly pervasive idea that the modern incarnation of experimental philosophy began with Joshua Knobe in 2003. I've been able to find indications that UCSD's Experimental Philosophy Lab was around at least as early as 1992 [1] [2], though pinpointing the movement's origins more precisely than that would require more expertise on the matter than I have. Subochre (talk) 21:20, 4 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]


•I think that the Criticisms section needs serious modification. For example, consider:

Many studies in experimental philosophy violate the presumption of 5 or more participants in each bin, and sometimes including as few as zero on both experimental and philosophical grounds.

I do not find this sentence comprehensible. As a start, could someone elucidate the presumption that is violated?

And here is another sentence:

He argues that a great deal of the experiments involved unusably small sample sizes low enough to produce no participants in some bins, most often failing to include enough female participants.

I understand that "he" here refers to Holtzman. But then we need citation, first of all. Afterwards we need a restructuring of the whole paragraph. Cemkay (talk) 01:26, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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