A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions

Sytsma, Justin (2009) A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions. In [2009] Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting (Bloomington, IN; June 12-14).

This is the latest version of this eprint.

Abstract

In two fascinating articles, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich (2004; forthcoming) use experimental methods to raise a specter of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian participants about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke’s Gödel example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in participants’ intuitions about that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We detail a type of perspectival ambiguity found in Machery et al.’s probe but not yet noted in the response literature. We argue that this ambiguity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of perspectival ambiguity on participants’ responses. We found that this accounts for much of the variation in Machery et al.’s original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, their argument is no longer convincing.

Available Versions of this Item

• The Case of the Divergent Descriptions: An Experimental Investigation of Semantics, Cross-cultural Style (deposited 23 August 2008)
  • A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions (deposited 29 January 2009)
    • A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions (deposited 19 May 2009)
      • A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions (deposited 02 November 2009) [Currently Displayed]