Mick Hartley

Did you know that atheists feel more pain when given electric shocks while looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary than do devout Catholics? This is the kind of cutting-edge psychological research being done nowadays. The subjects are, needless to say, wired up to a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, without which no psych laboratory is complete. Whether the reverse is true, and devout Catholics feel more pain when the picture is of Richard Dawkins, the article doesn't state. Nor whether this means that these Catholics would prefer to have their teeth extracted while gazing at images of the baby Jesus rather than under a local anaesthetic.

Anyway it's all very exciting, apparently:

A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.

Philosophers have always been informed by scientific research, history and psychology. Indeed, most of the giants of pre-20th century philosophy combined empirical and conceptual studies. Some drew on the research of others, while René Descartes and John Locke performed their own experiments; this was a time when science had not entirely split from philosophy. David Hume mixed reason with experience, including psychological and historical observations alongside more abstract reasoning—A Treatise of Human Nature was subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Methods of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.”

But for many philosophers today the idea of experimental philosophy still grates. Conceptual analysis has been a dominant strain of Anglo-American philosophy in the past 100 years. Philosophy of this kind considers not so much how things are, but rather how we think about them: the way we carve up the world, the frontiers of meaning, of what makes sense. But for the x-phi fan, empirical research is not a mere prop to philosophy, it is philosophy.

It is?

Out go fuddy-duddy men sitting in armchairs pondering, in come bright-eyed researchers in white coats. One of the pioneers here, apparently, is Joshua Knobe (don't forget that last e):

His work on intention soon attracted attention. Take one of his cases. A company chairman is told a new project will increase profits but harm the environment. He says, “I don’t care about harming the environment. Let’s start the new project. I just want to make as much profit as possible.” Meanwhile another company chairman is faced with a similar choice, except this time it will help the environment. He says, “I don’t care about helping the environment. Let’s start the project. I want to make as much profit as possible.” When asked whether the chairman intentionally harmed the environment in the first scenario, most people say “yes.” But did the chairman intentionally help the environment in the second scenario? Most people think not. This is weird. It led Knobe to conclude that people’s moral judgements play a role in their concept of intentional action.

Well no. There are two goods here: making a profit, and helping the environment. The first is a private, selfish, good; the second is a public good. In the first case they conflict, and we therefore condemn the chairman who puts his selfish good over the public good. In the second case the two goods coincide rather than conflict, so no decision needs to be made about which should take priority. The chairman in this case has no decision to make. It's therefore entirely reasonable for people to think that the chairman intentionally harmed the environment in the first scenario, but didn't intentionally help it in the second.

Which is nicely appropriate: the intuitive judgement of "most people" is perfectly sensible, while the clever explanation given by these x-phiers misses the point. And if they can't think clearly about this fairly straightforward moral problem, then perhaps the whole project isn't worth that much. It's a beautiful demonstration of precisely why we need philosophical reasoning. No amount of experimentation with MRI scanners is going to help them if they can't think straight.

Fortunately Raymond Tallis is allowed further on in the article to pour some cold water:

Using state-of-the-art gadgetry to cast light on philosophical mysteries sounds like a breakthrough, and grand claims are being made on the basis of neuroscientific observations. But Raymond Tallis, a philosopher and medical scientist who used MRI machines for years to study strokes and epilepsy, is not so sure. He thinks that the accuracy and relevance of brain scanning has been overestimated. MRI technology is excellent for investigating physical damage to the brain, Tallis explains, but when it comes to more complex matters, such as localising particular thought processes, it is too crude. The data from these scans, for example, reflects average activity. When a section of a brain is illuminated this is because it is operating at a heavier load than usual compared with other areas. Changes happening over the whole brain are not picked up. And even sophisticated neural imaging cannot distinguish between physical pain and social rejection—they “light up” the same areas.

There’s a more fundamental problem still, says Tallis. The magnetic tube can never replicate the real world—so answers given inside it are of limited value in predicting decisions that would be taken outside. The hypothetical scenarios presented to volunteers are ingenious but implausible. Even when suspending disbelief, subjects are not gripped by the same panic, indecision, fear and anguish that genuine moral dilemmas produce. Real decisions depend on the particular situation; ethical choices are not like T-junctions, where there are only two choices.

Some philosophers quietly dismiss the movement as a cynical step by researchers to appear cutting edge and to tap into scientists’ funding. Interdisciplinary research can be a shrewd career move: it can, as Tallis notes, allow you to “rise between two stools.” David Papineau, professor of the philosophy of science at King’s College London, says that philosophers who want to know about the real nature of categories like mind, free will, moral value and knowledge should on occasion abandon their armchairs and pay attention to relevant findings. But that doesn’t mean that they should be in the street handing passersby questionnaires: “I don’t see that they’ll learn anything worthwhile from asking ordinary people what they think about these things.”

A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem, a fact is not an interpretation, an “is” is not an “ought,” a description of how we actually behave and think is not a rationale for how we should behave and think.

See also here.

We await the x-phier bold enough to have subjects scanned while they read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. If they're going to replace philosophy with experimentation, they might as well do it properly.