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Category: Project

Description: Several recent critiques of experimental philosophy (x-Phi) research have noted that many experimental philosophers rarely sample demographically or culturally diverse populations but commonly only use convenience samples from online pools of participants, testing them in a single language. If experimental philosophers explicitly restricted the scope of their study conclusions to a particular sample or sub-set of people, this lack of sample diversity may not necessarily be problematic. With explicit qualifiers, the limited generalizability of results could remain clearly in view. However, if experimental philosophers systematically overgeneralized their conclusions (e.g., to 'philosophers' or 'lay people' in general) such that broader claims are not correlated with larger and more diverse claims, this would reveal significant methodological, epistemic, and ethical problems with x-Phi research going beyond the lack of diverse sampling and affecting the reliability and reproducibility of x-Phi findings. While systematic overgeneralizations have recently been found in the sciences, experimental philosophers might be especially skilled at avoiding such problems. Or they might be equally affected by them. No quantitative data and statistical analysis of how experimental philosophers generalize from their studies currently exist. This project aims to obtain such data and explore the methodological, epistemic, and ethical implications. It will do so by systematically reviewing all x-Phi studies from the last 5 years (2017 to January 2023) published in a set of 8 well known philosophy journals that frequently contain such studies.