The chapter is a general introduction to philosophical methods in the analytic tradition and aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding philosophical methods, an area that lacks systematic treatment in existing literature. It argues that philosophy is a methodical discipline despite its creative and speculative aspects, since philosophical inquiry typically follows standards of argumentation, evidence, and theoretical evaluation. The chapter also makes the first-stab proposal that a method is a structured, ordered procedure deliberately adopted to achieve a specific goal, (...) emphasizing that methods are goal-relative and evaluated in terms of their reliability, efficiency, and adequacy of aims. Further, it distinguishes between individual methods, families of methods, broader methodologies, and methodological issues, and considers the broadly epistemic goals of philosophical methods. The chapter also discusses debates about whether philosophy has distinctive methods (e.g., conceptual analysis or thought experiments), how philosophical methods should be assessed, and how persistent disagreement and limited consensus in philosophy raise concerns about progress and methodological success. It concludes by outlining the volume’s structure, which surveys important methods and methodological approaches in the analytic tradition—including formal methods, argumentation, conceptual analysis, thought experiments, experimental philosophy, and naturalism—offering a guide for newcomers to contemporary debates about philosophical practice. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged kind is (...) largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)

Forthcoming guide with brief introductions on methods in analytic philosophy by experts on the relevant topics. With sections on: formal methods, argumentation, inferential methods, thought experiments, intuition, ordinary language philosophy, conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering, naturalism, analytic feminism, experimental philosophy, and progress and disagreement in philosophy.

In his “On the Metaphysics of Knowledge” (this volume), Sven Bernecker presents a novel ‘identificationist’ account of knowledge. In this paper, I will not directly address the epistemological adequacy of Bernecker’s identificationism. Rather, I want to focus on its substantial metaphysical commitments, especially on the problematic idea that our epistemic reasons identify the truthmaker of our respective belief when we know something. My conclusion will be that being a truthmaker for p is metaphysically more demanding than being an epistemic reason (...) for p. A truthmaker for p must necessitate the truth of p, while an epistemic reason for p must merely indicate the truth of p. Thus, we should not expect that epistemic reasons identify the truthmakers of our knowledge-constituting beliefs in the way Bernecker suggests. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that testimony is not a fundamental source of knowledge, but merely a way to transmit already existing knowledge. However, Jennifer Lackey has presented some counterexamples which show that one can actually come to know something through testimony that no one ever knew before. Yet, the intuitive idea can be preserved by the weaker claim that someone in a knowledge-constituting testimonial chain has to have access to some non-testimonial source of knowledge with regard to what is testified. But (...) even this weaker claim has a counterexample which I develop in close connection with a safety-account of knowledge. Thus, testimonial statements can sometimes enable us to know something for which none of our informants has any source of knowledge available. I conclude that my counterexample nevertheless does not affect the core of our intuitions about testimony, although it establishes that testimony can indeed be a fundamental source of knowledge. (shrink)