Eyes as Windows to Minds: Psycholinguistics for Experimental Philosophy

Abstract

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential 'salience bias'. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox ('argument from hallucination'). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods' philosophical usefulness.

Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic study of defeasible default inferences

“…A forced-choice plausibility ranking experiment (reported in Supplementary Appendix, Section C, to the present paper) confirmed that epistemic agent features are yet more strongly associated with 'aware' than 'see'-where the association is strong enough to support a prominent epistemic use ('I see your point'), arguably interpreted with the common metaphorinterpretation strategy of stereotype-feature transfer (Bortfeld and McGlone 2001;Searle 1993). Plausibility ratings elicited in a comprehension study with eye tracking confirmed that, where contextually irrelevant and unsupported, spatial patient features (X is before S) get completely suppressed in interpreting 'aware' (though not 'see') sentences (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019); this suggests they are weakly associated with 'aware'. We tentatively conclude that, in the 'aware' stereotype, epistemic agent features are very strongly associated with the verb, whereas the other features are weakly associated.…”

“…An eye-tracking study revealed extensive similarities in intricate processing patterns for 'aware'-and 'see'-sentences which strongly suggest similar schemas are deployed in interpreting them (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019) with the retention strategy (see above, Sect. 3.1).…”

“…Rather, according to the Retention/Suppression Hypothesis (Giora 2003;Giora et al 2014), its interpretation (e.g., 'I see your point') may involve retaining the dominant schema and suppressing its contextually inappropriate features (agent S uses her eyes; patient X is located in front of S, etc.) while deploying the contextually relevant ones (S knows what X is) (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019). This 'retention strategy' (for short) has been shown to be used in interpreting irony (Giora et al 2007b), sarcasm (Fein et al 2015), and metaphor (Giora et al 2007a;Giora and Fein 1999).…”

Folk Core Beliefs about Color

“…We wanted to develop a survey that could comprehensively assess a sizable number of non-philosophers' responses with respect to all five of Johnston's core beliefs, so that we could compare participant agreement across them. We encourage researchers to employ many methods, including psycholinguistic methods (Fischer and Engelhardt 2016, 2017, 2019, because the triangulation of data from different methods will certainly yield a richer understanding of folk core beliefs about color.…”

Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophy

“…The first experiments to examine the Salience Bias Hypothesis provided supporting evidence from perception verbs, and illustrate the interplay between these conditions: An eye-tracking study revealed extensive similarities in intricate processing patterns for 'aware'-and 'see'-sentences that strongly suggest similar schemas are deployed in interpreting them (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019b) with the Retention/Suppression strategy [as per condition (ii)]. However, a corpus analysis on random 1000-sentence samples from the British National Corpus confirmed that while the visual use is clearly the most frequent for 'S sees X' (68% of sampled occurrences) [as per (i)], it is far less frequent for 'S is aware of X' (23%) (Fischer and Engelhardt 2017a).…”