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 the method of cases, and whether results in experimental philosophy have shown that the armchair version of that method should perhaps be abandoned. Experimental philosophy (“X-phi”) seems to indicate that our verdicts about thought experiments are vulnerable to demographic variation and unconscious contextual influences. Yet experimental philosophers have long struggled to articulate clearly the pessimistic upshot from these vulnerabilities to error. Weinberg and Alexander argue that the central questions involved in these debates have been misframed by relying on traditional epistemic terminology, such as: are intuitions about cases reliable enough to provide knowledge? Instead they ask: what methodological advantages can experimental philosophy bring to the method of cases that cannot be gained while we remain seated in our philosophical armchairs? Answering this question requires turning our attention from questions of epistemic normativity to questions of methodological rationality. When philosophers start engaging seriously with the ways that experimental methods can augment more traditional philosophical methods, and perhaps must do so if we are to avoid various sorts of errors, then we can hope for real philosophical progress. Weinberg and Alexander argue 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.