Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studiesas represented in our samplesuccessfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.
For scientific theories grounded in empirical data, replicability is a core principle, for at least two reasons. First, unless we accept to have scientific theories rest on the authority of a small number of researchers, empirical studies should be replicable, in the sense that its methods and procedure should be detailed enough for someone else to conduct the same study. Second, for empirical results to provide a solid foundation for scientific theorizing, they should also be replicable, in the sense that most attempts at replicating the original study that produced them would yield similar results. The XPhi Replicability Project is primarily concerned with replicability in the second sense, that is: the replicability of results. In the past year, several projects have shed doubt on the replicability of key findings in psychology, and most notably social psychology. Because the methods of experimental philosophy have often been close to the ones used in social psychology, it is only natural to wonder to which extent the results experimental philosophers ground their theory are replicable. The aim of the XPhi Replicability Project is precisely to reach a reliable estimate of the replicability of empirical results in experimental philosophy. To this end, several research teams across the world will replicate around 40 studies in experimental philosophy, some among the most cited, others drawn at random. The results of the project will be published in a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology dedicated to the topic of replicability in cognitive science.The official website of the project can be found here :https://sites.google.com/site/thexphireplicabilityproject/homeThe project can also be followed on social medias:https://twitter.com/XPhiReplicationhttps://www.facebook.com/XPhiReplicabilityProject/
Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word "intuition" has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia (and perhaps beyond). It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy.
Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ
Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide reasons to think they are ill-founded.
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