Rationally Speaking #21 - Joshua Knobe on Experimental Philosophy
Rationally Speaking Podcast
English - November 07, 2010 19:48 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 464 ratingsNatural Sciences Science Social Sciences philosophy science skepticism Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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.