What Experimental Philosophy means for Traditional Psychology

I have a confession to make. Although our group of bloggers is described as "a band of philosophers," I'm faking the funk, so to speak. In real life, I'm a psychologist through and through. So I'm thankful to my real-philosopher colleagues for giving me a "pass" to contribute to this blog (and to the field). At the end of the day, I like to think that experimental philosophy is really social psychology with a fresh set of questions to investigate.

But still, what is a psychologist doing on a blog about experimental philosophy? Aside from the required quota of one psychologist per Psychology Today blog (okay, I just made that up), here's a more interesting, albeit indirect answer. As Joshua explained in his first post, there didn't used to be much of a distinction between philosophy and psychology. In fact, in my own institution the first 20 years of psychology were taught from within the department of philosophy. For many reasons, philosophy and psychology soon parted ways--this made sense given that psychology was struggling to become a scientific discipline in its own right. But it turns out that the divide between the two wasn't very deep. Psychologists never stopped being influenced by philosophers (as most evident in field of cognitive science, which, among other disciplines, includes philosophy and cognitive psychology), and philosophers continued to write about psychological matters.

My career choice was a direct result of the ongoing relationship between philosophy and psychology. One of the primary reasons I originally became interested in psychology was because I was intrigued by some of the "big" questions about how the mind works that I had been exposed to by reading philosophy as an undergraduate. Rather than go to graduate school in philosophy, however, I was excited about the possibility of discovering new things about the mind through experimentation, which led me to pursue training in empirical psychology. But I couldn't shake the feeling that philosophers were asking fundamentally interesting questions (sometimes far more interesting than the psychology I was reading), so I kept a not-so-secret life as an amateur philosopher.

So when I first heard about experimental philosophy (through Joshua Knobe, fellow blogger, whose work I knew about because of his publications in social psychology journals), I was very excited that a group of philosophers were turning their attention toward the empirical process. But I was especially excited that an empirically trained psychologist like me, who was never able to shake his love for philosophy, might get a chance to collaborate with people who were asking such interesting questions. As it turned out from browsing Thomas Nadelhoffer's website (a great place to find experimental philosophers discussing their work with each other), I shared research interests with many experimental philosophers; I was doing work that they considered experimental philosophy, and they were doing work that I considered social psychology.



What continues to excite me about experimental philosophy is not only the interesting questions this group of philosophers ask, but the tools they bring to the empirical approach. As psychology students we are trained to be rigorous in our empirical approach (experimental design, methods, statistical analyses, etc.). Traditional philosophy has little need for these tools, but philosophers receive training that emphasizes a clarity and rigor of thought that can be invaluable to a social scientist constructing and testing theories. It is not an insult to either field to say that there is a clear benefit to collaboration. (And I'm clearly not the first to realize this. We're talking about philosophy on a website called Psychology Today, after all.)

That said, in my role as token psychologist (which I embrace with humility), I'll play to my strengths and talk a bit more often about findings from my own field (social psychology) and how they relate to experimental philosophy.