Malapropos Experimental Philosophy
It's Sunday, and I'm writing a brief section on the history of sequent calculus for my thesis. Wanted to dig up some old papers that I need, but - of course - the uni library is closed.
So, a digression: After seeing Francis Jeffry Pelletier give a talk about the logic of generics in Oslo (@ CSMN), I got a bit interested in experimental philosophy and logic. Pelletier did some nice work testing intuitions about generics, and related this to default logic. My thought was that the idea of testing "inferential intuitions" rather than "truth-conditional intutions" might lead us to some interesting collaboration between Arché FLC and Methodology. (If anyone can recommend recent work on experimental philosophy for logic/phil of logic, I would be pleased.) Yet, this is just Sunday morning musings.
Instead of undigested thoughts on the issue, I give you the perils of experimental philosophy.
So, a digression: After seeing Francis Jeffry Pelletier give a talk about the logic of generics in Oslo (@ CSMN), I got a bit interested in experimental philosophy and logic. Pelletier did some nice work testing intuitions about generics, and related this to default logic. My thought was that the idea of testing "inferential intuitions" rather than "truth-conditional intutions" might lead us to some interesting collaboration between Arché FLC and Methodology. (If anyone can recommend recent work on experimental philosophy for logic/phil of logic, I would be pleased.) Yet, this is just Sunday morning musings.
Instead of undigested thoughts on the issue, I give you the perils of experimental philosophy.
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11 comments:
There's a great deal of empirical work on inferential intuitions, but it's done by psychologists. To begin, try looking at Jonathan Evans -- www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/jevans -- or Vinod Goel -- http://www.yorku.ca/vgoel/
Both Evans and Goel are focused on psychological factors differentiating competent and incompetent inference, and in cases in which it will seem like an argument is valid when it is not (e.g. thanks to belief bias).
There's a massive literature on these issues, going back to Wason, but these guys are on top right now...
Dear Jennifer,
That's very helpful. I'm not surprised to see that there is a massive literature here. A bit daunting, but mostly just fascinating.
Closer to the truth-conditional stuff you're looking to avoid, I've done some stuff on intuitions about contradictions (eg "It both is and isn't near", "It neither is nor isn't near") when dealing with vague predicates. I'm writing it all up atm, but the short version: some folks never agree with the contradiction, while some folks like the contradictions in the borderline cases but not in clear cases.
Closer to the inferential stuff, I'd be particularly curious to see probing of inferential intuitions around negation. In my present state of ignorance, I'd bet the De Morgan laws are on sturdier intuitive ground than double negation laws, which are themselves on sturdier intuitive ground than ECQ. But I'd love to see if anyone's looked at that. If not, I suppose I've just got more to do!
Keep it rocking!
Thanks Dave! I'd love to see the results of such a test. I'm just worried about how to arrange cases. How robust intuitions about certain properties of negations are might turn out to be extremely case-sensitive. (If other evidence from psychology literature is anything to go on.)
I'd suspect the same. But that very case-sensitivity might help with another problem in the area: how to distinguish the particularly linguistic inferences people make from inferences that tacitly appeal to their previous beliefs about various domains?
If responses can be pushed around by switching up content (crudely, if people buy double-negation laws when talking about bears but not about elephants, or about math but not about emotions), it's a good sign those responses were dependent on some kind of domain-specific process, not just linguistic competence.
Conversely, the more an inference pattern is robust across domains, the better it looks for the claim that it's driven by something domain-independent. Will there be any inference patterns with the right kind of stability? There are the famous failures of modus tollens---how about modus ponens?
Agreed. And in a sense this is precisely what is going on when you and others test how people's reasoning might differ from vague to non-vague discourses.
Modus ponens: I'm not sure anyone ever tested McGee like cases. Seems like an obvious case study.
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