Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument

Abstract

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings with pupillometry to document this 'salience bias': We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate.

Conceptual control: on the feasibility of conceptual engineering

“…2.1) lead from verbal case descriptions to intuitions about what else is also true of the cases described. One body of work has made a start on developing an epistemological profile for this process, with a view to assessing not only intuitions (Fischer and Engelhardt 2016), but also inferences in verbal reasoning (Fischer and Engelhardt 2017a;2017b;2019a;2019b;. While this research has been directed at other research questions, its findings speak directly to the issue of conceptual control.…”

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

“…2.2) will lead to salience bias and inappropriate inferences that may vitiate philosophical argument-confirming Austin's (1962, p. 63) hunch that 'tampering with words … is always liable to have unforeseen repercussions.' Thus, it has been suggested that arguments from hallucination (e.g., Ayer 1956;Smith 2002) rely on factive inferences that are licensed by the dominant perceptual sense of perception verbs, but not the phenomenal sense intended in the arguments (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a) and that Chalmers' (1996) zombie argument relies on inferences from his technical use of 'zombie' that are licensed only by the noun's dominant ('Hollywood') sense and are defeated by contextual information essential to the argument (Fischer and Sytsma 2020). 23 At the same time, evidence that the ordinary use of causal attributions is morally laden (e.g., Livengood et al 2017;Livengood and Sytsma 2020), whereas metaphysical argument often intends a purely descriptive use, motivates the question whether common philosophical thought experiments that use morally valenced cases (assassinations, etc.)…”

“…Default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences (Levinson 2000), enrich our spontaneous understanding of verbal case descriptions and premises of arguments. These defeasible default inferences shape philosophical thought experiments (Saint-Germier 2019) and arguments couched in natural language (Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a). J. L. Austin (1962) mooted the idea that they sometimes do so not for better but for worse.…”

“…Acceptance of such a reconstruction can amount to adoption of a new, more fully spelled out argument, but cannot establish that a particular automatic inference was involved in the original argument.6 To date, evidential experimental philosophy focused on assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments about verbally described cases, mainly in order to evaluate thought experiments employing the 'method of cases'(Machery 2017). Some proponents of the research program have advocated its extension to the assessment of premises (Nado 2016) and inferences(Fischer and Engelhardt 2019a) in philosophical arguments beyond thought experiments.…”

No hope for the Irrelevance Claim

“…Furthermore, I contend that similar considerations apply to other cases in which intuitions have been found to influence whether people accept premises of philosophical arguments. For instance, Fischer and Engelhardt (2019) argue that processes of stereotype enrichment also underwrite judgements about crucial premises in the Argument from Hallucination. If these findings are right, then intuition driving this argument would presumably play an epistemically significant role in philosophical inquiry.…”