Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal Interview on Experimental Philosophy with Joshua Knobe Pendaran Roberts*1, Joshua Knobe2 1Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick; 2 Program in Cognitive Science & Department of Philosophy, Yale University *Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract This conversation piece contains an interview with Joshua Knobe. It provides a useful introduction to what experimental philosophy is and the interdisciplinary collaborations it encourages. Pendaran Roberts and Joshua Knobe collaboratively developed this conversation piece via email. Joshua Knobe is a renowned experimental philosopher, who works on a range of philosophical issues, including philosophy of mind, action and ethics. He is a professor in the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is most known for what is now called the ‘Knobe effect’. Keywords: experimental philosophy, interdisciplinary research, teaching of philosophy, job market Introduction Peer review: This article has been subject to a Experimental philosophy is an exciting new way that philosophers are double blind peer review process engaging with philosophical questions. Joshua Knobe is here to tell us more about experimental philosophy. This new way of engaging with philosophical questions differs from the ways most modern philosophers engage with these questions. These ways can be loosely characterised by © Copyright: The the analytic and continental methods. Analytic philosophy is Authors. This article is characterised by an almost mathematical style of writing that emphasises issued under the terms of precision (the writing style bears a resemblance to that of the sciences), the Creative Commons Attribution Non- whereas continental philosophy is characterised by a loser style. A Commercial Share Alike thorough analysis of the distinction is outside our scope. What’s License, which permits important to recognise is that both types of philosophy, at least as of our use and redistribution of the work provided that time, largely shy away from empirical methods. The questions with which the original author and they deal, many of them might say, are not empirical questions. source are credited, the work is not used for In contrast, experimental philosophers design experiments to directly commercial purposes and engage with philosophically relevant questions. For example, whereas an that any derivative works are made available under analytic or continental philosopher may just claim that such and such is the same license terms. Roberts and Knobe. Exchanges 2016 4(1), pp. 14-28 14 Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal intuitive from the armchair, the experimental philosopher will hold that it is important to run an experiment to see if the folk agree. Thus, experimental philosophy can be seen as questioning philosophers who see empirical methods as irrelevant to philosophical inquiry. The above was just a brief description of experimental philosophy. Those outside of the philosophical tradition, and many in it, have a difficult time understanding exactly what experimental philosophy is and how it is relevant to philosophy and the broader academic world. Joshua Knobe is here to help us to understand these issues. He is a well-known experimental philosopher, appointed as a Professor in both the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy at Yale. He was previously Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His BA, which he received in 1996, is from Stanford University. Knobe received his PhD from Princeton University in 2006. Knobe is best known for his work on intentional action (2003). He found that people ascribe intentions to others in an asymmetrical fashion. In his experiment, people were asked to imagine a corporate executive motivated entirely by profit who embarks on a policy he knows will harm the environment. Is this harm intentional? Most people say, ‘yes.’ However, when considering a similar case in which the side effects of the executive’s actions are beneficial for the environment, most say, ‘no.’ This study spawned a series of papers that further investigated this, as it is now known, ‘Knobe effect’ (Knobe, 2006; Pettit & Knobe, 2009). Interview Pendaran Roberts (PR): Josh, I would like to start this interview by asking you to explain in rough terms, what exactly experimental philosophy is. Joshua Knobe (JK): Experimental philosophy is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. Very roughly, the field aims to make progress on the kinds of questions traditionally associated with philosophy using the kinds of methods traditionally associated with psychology. PR: Some people argue that experimental philosophy is misguided. These people believe that philosophy is not concerned with what ordinary people think, so psychological methods are irrelevant. Do you agree with this objection? Why or why not? JK: When people say things like this, they are presumably drawing on a conception of philosophy that became popular only relatively recently in the history of the discipline. In particular, they seem to be thinking Roberts and Knobe. Exchanges 2016 4(1), pp. 14-28 15 Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal specifically about the kind of philosophy that became dominant with the rise of the analytic tradition in the twentieth century. When it comes to the issues that have been most central within this tradition, there is indeed a difficult question as to whether or not it is at all relevant to know anything about how human beings actually think or feel. Some philosophers argue that empirical facts about people’s ordinary intuitions are relevant to these issues; others argue that such facts are completely irrelevant. This debate gets us into difficult questions in philosophical methodology, questions that are very much worthy of further exploration. However, it is also worth emphasising that analytic philosophy is a relatively recent development. In many earlier periods in the history of philosophy, people had a much broader understanding of the purview of the discipline. Thus, if we focus on the kinds of issues that were taken up in earlier periods, it may begin to seem completely obvious that facts about how human beings think and feel are philosophically relevant. These facts are not relevant just because they might bear indirectly on topics in metaphysics, epistemology or conceptual analysis. They are relevant in and of themselves, just because philosophy is centrally concerned with questions about human beings. For a simple example, take Spinoza’s Ethics. Spinoza makes enormously important contributions to questions in metaphysics, and philosophers could reasonably debate whether facts about human psychology could ever shed any light on those sorts of question. However, the majority of the text is not about metaphysics. Most of it is taken up with questions concerning human psychology – indeed, with some of the very same questions that experimental philosophers are investigating today. Spinoza does not seem to think that these psychological questions are relevant only because they might somehow shed light on more metaphysical issues. Rather, he is directly concerned with philosophical questions about human life and the human mind. If I may be forgiven a brief autobiographical digression, it was this more traditional sort of work that drew me into philosophy in the first place. I was reading Spinoza, Nietzsche, Hume, Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and I completely fell in love. Then, when I went to graduate school, I was shocked to discover that the culture of philosophy had switched around in such a way that many of the core themes in the work of these thinkers were regarded as falling outside the scope of the discipline. (One professor told me explicitly that most of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature didn’t count as philosophy.) Anyway, my sense is that the pendulum is now swinging back. A lot of the papers being published in Roberts and Knobe. Exchanges 2016 4(1), pp. 14-28 16 Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal philosophy journals these days seem closer in spirit to Hume than they do to the stuff people were doing in the 1970s. Okay, with all this in mind, consider again the question about the philosophical relevance of experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophers have learned a lot about how people understand morality, free will, knowledge, and the self. One might see this work as an attempt to rigorously investigate people’s ordinary intuitions, and one might then ask whether it bears on the kinds of issues most closely associated with analytic philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, etc.). This is a good question and one we should continue to investigate. However, it would be a big mistake to suppose that experimental work could only be philosophically relevant if it turned out to be relevant to issues like these. Regardless of whether the findings shed light on the issues most closely associated with analytic philosophy, they are clearly telling us something important about how people think and feel, and they are therefore relevant in a very direct way to the sorts of issues explored in more traditional philosophy. PR: But traditionally philosophy was a much broader discipline than it is today in that many issues with which it was concerned are now recognised as being scientific questions. If experimental philosophy is not relevant to the concerns of philosophy today, what right does it have to call itself ‘experimental philosophy.’ We don’t call psychology and/or neuroscience ‘experimental philosophy of mind.’ I mean we could, but that would be confusing. Is the name ‘experimental philosophy’ confusing then? If so, maybe some change of how we categorise things is called for? JK: To begin with, I should emphasise that I am not advocating any kind of change; I am just defending the status quo. Right now, there are a lot of people widely recognised as ‘philosophers‘ working on empirical questions about the human mind. Some of them do experiments, others engage in more purely theoretical research. My view is that the system presently in place is very well-justified and should not be changed.