Rationally Speaking #21 - Joshua Knobe on Experimental Philosophy
Rationally Speaking Podcast
New York City Skeptics
4.6 • 787 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2010
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our guest, Joshua Knobe, is a philosopher interested in cognitive science, so interested, in fact, that he has contributed to establishing a whole new branch of inquiry known as experimental philosophy — and he plausibly claims that the name is not actually an oxymoron!
The idea is summarized in this way on one of the major web sites devoted to the enterprise: "Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily think about the issues at the foundation of the philosophical discussion.”
Joshua Knobe is an assistant professor at Yale University, affiliated both with the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy . Most of his work involves using the kinds of experimental methods associated with cognitive science to address the kinds of questions associated with philosophy.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education. |
| 0:22.6 | For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org. |
| 0:30.7 | Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. |
| 0:40.6 | I'm your host, Massimo Filucci, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev. |
| 0:45.2 | Julia, what are we going to talk about today? |
| 0:47.6 | Massimo, we have a special guest with us today. |
| 0:50.3 | Here in the studio with us is Joshua Nob, who is an assistant professor at Yale University in both cognitive science and philosophy. |
| 0:58.2 | He is a pioneer of the young but fast-growing subfield of philosophy called experimental philosophy, or I like its nickname X-Fi for short. |
| 1:08.1 | Joshua, welcome. |
| 1:09.2 | Thanks. |
| 1:10.4 | So I was going to try to sum up the mandate of experimental |
| 1:14.5 | philosophy, but then I realize that's silly when we have an expert in the field right here in the studio |
| 1:19.0 | with us. So do you want to give us some background on what the field is and what its purpose is? |
| 1:23.4 | Well, experimental philosophy is sort of a new movement within philosophy that has philosophers |
| 1:28.3 | sort of leaving their armchairs to go out and actually do experimental studies. |
| 1:33.1 | So in that way, experimental philosophy is kind of reconnecting with an older tradition within philosophy, |
| 1:38.9 | where philosophy was supposed to be concerned with questions about human nature, about how human beings actually think and feel. |
| 1:45.5 | So a lot of those questions and philosophy sort of got branched off into the sciences, right? So is that the kind of return that you're talking about, returning to its scientific roots? |
| 1:54.9 | Right, exactly. So there used to be the sense of what a philosopher was, that a philosopher was supposed to be someone who just thought in a deep |
| 2:01.2 | and broad way about how things in general sort of hang together. And then there became a sense |
| 2:06.6 | maybe at certain times that philosophy should be understood as a highly specific academic discipline, |
| 2:11.3 | where philosophers could ignore questions about history, about literature, or poetry, or the |
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