Hey All,
I just finished a chapter for a volume I’m contributing to. Paper and abstract below. The psychological research on which this paper is based is also attached below.
-Zach
Abstract:
The last ten years in philosophy have been marked by widespread interest in the psychology of philosophy. Much of this work has been carried out by Experimental Philosophers, who aim to better understand the contours of philosophical concepts and intuitions by importing the methods of the empirical sciences. Their hope is that through a better understanding of the psychology of philosophical concepts such as KNOWS, GOOD, FREEDOM and many others, we will be better able to assess philosophical arguments which utilize such notions.
Experimental philosophers have amassed many interesting results, but compelling concerns have been raised about the survey methods that they typically employ. Here we argue, on the basis of these criticisms and our own, that the possibility of experimental artifacts is good reason to adopt a new experimental paradigm that we call Semantic Integration. This methodology uses a memory task as an implicit measure of the degree to which different situations instantiate concepts. This measure avoids the methodological problems researchers must address if they are to continue to use surveys.
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