Brian Leiter’s blog, Leiter Reports, has explained that his advisory board will not add “experimental philosophy” to the specialty rankings. Although I am sympathetic with Leiter and the advisory board’s decision, I believe that the decision should be reversed in future Philosophical Gourmet Reports. What I want to suggest here is that the advisory board consider adding a more inclusive heading to the specialty rankings, i.e., “philosophical methodology” or “meta-philosophy”, and that this heading capture under its heading experimental philosophy. By doing so, the report will be more inclusive, rather than less inclusive, and it will promote an area of study that distinguishes philosophy from other academic disciplines.
Leiter gives a very broad summary of the justification he and the advisory board use to keep “experimental philosophy” off the specialty rankings. They decided against adding it because (i) the boundaries of experimental philosophy are unclear and (ii) experimental philosophy is more like a methodology than it is an area of study. I believe that both justifications for keeping experimental philosophy off the specialty rankings are unwarranted. But I must criticize the decision cautiously. I am not privy to the conversations or correspondences Leiter and his advisory board has had about the issue because I am not an advisory board member. So I don’t know for certain what specific reasons they had for not including experimental philosophy in the specialty rankings. I also don’t know whether they had considered something like what I will propose in this blog post. It may very well be that the advisory board suggested exactly what I am about to outline. I don’t want to seem overly arrogant here; I’m merely making a suggestion.
Let me begin by contending with (ii), which I believe is the more controversial claim of Leiter and the advisory board. There is no doubt that experimental philosophy is distinct from other areas of philosophical study because it employs an alternative methodology, one that is more common in the social and applied sciences. Through the use of these alternative methods, it addresses philosophical issues raised in the common fields of philosophical inquiry, such as ethics (applied ethics), metaphysics (free will), and epistemology (justification). (So far as I know there is no one working on experimental work in logic, but — of course — I could be incorrect.) Studying philosophical methods itself is an area of expertise, an area of specialized study, that a person may choose to study. Think of all the critical thinking texts that have been written. They are essentially a guidebook of correct forms of reasoning. Some of these texts even review bad forms of reasoning, which we should avoid in philosophical projects. I take it that the point of critical thinking is to study (perhaps, to become an expert in) the methods of philosophical research employed by the discipline. If experimental philosophy employs an alternative method, then that method will have good and bad forms. One of the burdens philosophers shoulder is telling us which forms of the alternative method are good and which ones are bad. That is, after all, what all philosophers seem to agree upon: philosophy is a normative discipline fully invested in telling us how we should reason, what we should believe, and how we ought to behave. Thus study of the methods experimental philosophy employs and determining which ones are good and which are bad is an area of specialized study. Given that this is the case, it is not too far fetched to say that experimental philosophy, under the auspices of meta-philosophy or philosophical methodology, is an area of specialized study.
(As a side note, I should mention that while I was a graduate student taking statistics courses the statistics professor often pointed out to students that there are philosophical issues raised in statistics. What statistical tests are good ones? What ones bad? He claimed that these are issues statisticians are not interested in pursuing. He believed the best work on these issues could be undertaken by the philosophy department because he did not have the time to investigate whether test a is appropriate for experiment x.)
Having argued that philosophical methodology should be considered an area of specialized study, I want to address a possible criticism one might raise in opposition. All of philosophy’s subfields employ some methodology. Many of the areas of philosophy, for instance, employ what has been termed armchair methods, i.e., a philosopher just thinks about a topic and using good forms of reasoning comes to a conclusion on this topic. If we include philosophical methodology as an area of specialized study, then the Philosophical Gourmet Report will have to eliminate all subfields because they use some method to go about philosophizing. Hence, for lack of better justification, we need meta-philosophy or philosophical methodology to remain off the specialized study list.
Although the criticism does point out, and rightfully so, that all areas of philosophy use some method, I believe that it’s forgetting what makes philosophy a unique discipline. What distinguishes us from other disciplines is that we do have questions over the legitimacy of the methods we use. Ask a biologist or a chemist whether the scientific method is something they have reason to adopt and you will undoubtedly be met with an incredulous stare. They really do not care whether it’s the appropriate method to use. It works, and that’s that. If what makes us unique is the exploration of our methods and there is a distinction between appropriate and inappropriate methods to use, then the study of these methods — a normative study — should be an area of specialized study the philosopher may undertake.
(i) is a little more difficult to criticize, largely because I believe that the boundaries of experimental philosophy are unclear. Of course, that criticism should apply to most other sub-divisions of philosophy too. Oughtn’t it? Take the study of free will for example. When we go about talking of free will, we inevitably have to discuss (argue for) other metaphysical notions as well, such as causation. Similarly, discussions of free will seem to bleed into discussions of moral responsibility and motivations to act. That the boundaries of experimental philosophy are unclear is true, but that other areas of philosophical study are not seems like an unusual claim.
