Manifesto

Our inquiries are inspired by the need for critical reflection on the methodological foundations of so-called experimental philosophy: the increasingly prominent tendency in philosophical research to “test” hypotheses about the meanings of concepts, the logical forms of sentences or the validity of inferences by appealing to the linguistic competence of “ordinary language users”. The philosophical significance of the results obtained in this way is hotly debated, but usually at too high a level of abstraction. Critics who deny such significance to empirical research most often reject the very possibility that philosophical theory could be sensitive to any facts. In their view, philosophy describes the realm of possibility, or, better still, necessity. We do not share this view.

We believe that philosophy should describe the world as it is, and that philosophers must take facts into account. We allow that empirical investigation of facts, particularly psychological or linguistic facts, may have philosophical significance, especially for the philosophy of language and cognition. Thus, at the most general level, we share the assumption of experimental philosophy.

We believe, however, that in practice many studies within this movement interpret their results with far too little restraint. A kind of maximalism can be observed in attempts to restrict the scope of traditional philosophical reflection. Our goal is to conduct our own empirical research while adopting a minimalist approach in this respect. By conducting empirical research ourselves, we want to investigate from within what the facts really require and what is merely an empiricist overclaim. We believe that some empirical discoveries do indeed require revisions to existing philosophical theories; we also know, however, that many allegedly sensational results can readily be reconciled with what philosophers have long thought.