Author Description

In Standing Up For Philosophy, Jonathan Weinberg And Joshua Alexander Seek To Radically Reformulate The Debate Over Armchair Philosophy, And Whether Results In Experimental Philosophy Have Shown That Philosophical Thought-experiments Are So Problematic That Perhaps They Should Be Abandoned. Experimental Philosophy (x-phi) Seems To Indicate That Our Verdicts On Such Thought-experiments Are Vulnerable To Demographic Variation And Unconscious Contextual Influences. Yet Experimentalist Philosophers Have Long Struggled To Articulate The Pessimistic Upshot From These Vulnerabilities To Error. Weinberg And Alexander Argue That These Debates Have Been Misframed In Traditional Epistemic Terminology, Such As: Whether The Method Of Cases Is Sufficiently Reliable To Provide Knowledge. The Trouble With This Framework Is That It Cannot Reckon With Experimental Philosophy's Dirty Little Secret, Namely, That The Method Of Cases Is Probably Not In Such A Bad Way That It Cannot Sometimes Be Put To Good Use Somewhere And Somehow-- Provided By Publisher.