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• W2561897777 abstract "Here’s a pocket theory on philosophy’s poor progress,1 compared with the sciences:in the sciences, we have generally done a great job of taking humans out of the equation, both in terms of removing intentional idioms from our scientific explanations(going back to Descartes, at least), and perhaps more important, learning how toexpand human cognitive powers (e.g., instruments) and overcome human cognitivefoibles (e.g., using statistics instead of only eyeballing generalizations). Even in thescientific study of human psychology, we have had greater success in the placeswhere such dehumanization can be carried out, than in places where it can’t. (Thisraises its own set of issues for philosophy of psychology, which I won’t pursue here.)But so much of what is still part of philosophy’s portfolio concerns domains forwhich we have no sources of information that go beyond the more or less unaidedhuman agent.2 Justice, goodness, agency, beauty, explanation, mereology, meaning, rationality-all of these are matters for which we have next to no capacity tobuild detectors, or even to begin to imagine how to build them. The only detectors we have for them, is us. (Perhaps in some of these we could train artificialpattern-detectors to recognize what we do-but that would be purely parasitic onthe human capacities, and not an extension of or bypassing of those capacities.)These concepts are also not generally good candidates for being pure theoreticalposits. We do not have a theory of human psychology, say, for which “moralgoodness” gets coined in order to explain some broader class of phenomenaantecedently specified in non-“goodness”-involving terms. If some aliens withoutany capacity for aesthetic evaluation were to study us, they might have to create anovel term in their language in order to theorize about our predications of“beautiful,” and try to explain their source. But we are not such aliens. I do not meanto deny that many of our philosophical terms of art are pure theoretical posits (suchas “warrant,” for example, in some parts of the Gettierological tradition), but eventhose typically have their relevant explananda specified in terms that are not (suchas “knowledge”). In short, we humans are our best, and only, instruments fordetecting the presence or absence of many philosophically important properties.So, let’s embrace that situation, in good Reidian fashion, by affirming that weare at least minimally adequate detectors of these philosophically important properties. If these properties are ones for which humans are the only instruments weare likely to get, then let’s accept as a starting point that humans are at leastsomewhat decent instruments for them-pace radical views like Mackian errortheories, there are truths to be had in these domains, and we are getting at leastsome good information about those truths. If we allow ourselves such a startingpoint, then where can we go next from there?Some philosophers, even at the highest levels of the profession, have claimedthat our ordinary capacities are epistemically successful enough for philosophersto muddle through, and have suggested that to ask more than that from philosophy is to betray a commitment to an untenable form of scientism. Were we justinterested in a basic level of justification in our philosophical beliefs on the whole,then maybe that modicum of reliability would suffice, just as people’s ordinaryarithmetical abilities are often sufficient to the more rudimentary tasks of theirdaily lives, and even somewhat more demanding tasks like doing one’s taxes. But, asphilosophers, we’re presumably not just interested in having some fairly basic level ofjustification in our philosophical beliefs, any more than scientists or mathematicians are just interested in having some fairly basic level of justification in theirscientific or mathematical beliefs. We appropriately require much more of ourselves,in order to increase our chances of getting a hold on the real facts of the matter.One way of thinking about this is that we expect that our minimally decentphilosophical reliability is not evenly distributed across our cognitive range, andthat by this point we’ve already got our hands on most of the facts for whichwe’re particularly reliable, and thus the philosophical questions that are still (still!)open for us must be ones which our basic capacities cannot sufficiently address ontheir own. And, as already noted, we do not seem able to supplement thesecapacities with novel devices, like a litmus strip for agency. What we need to do,then, is to deploy a different kind of approach, one that has also been successfullyused by other forms of inquiry: we must find better ways of extracting the information from instruments that we already have. And how are we to do that? Mycontention in this chapter is that the answer to that question will require a substantial contribution from experimental philosophy-or, at least, the major branch ofexperimental philosophy concerned with using the methods of the cognitive andsocial sciences to understand the nature and functioning of what I am calling hereour human philosophical instruments.3 Given our interest in continualimprovement and refining of our philosophical methods, I argue, experimentalphilosophy will prove inevitable." @default.
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• W2561897777 date "2015-04-24" @default.
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• W2561897777 title "Humans as instruments: Or, the inevitability of experimental philosophy" @default.
• W2561897777 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315714196-16" @default.
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