Jason’s Reviews > Experimental Philosophy > Status Update

Notes 1st paper: There's an assumption among people who study knowledge that to arrive at any criteria for what it takes to be a knowledge claim (normative), one can relay on intuitions to generate these criterion. That is to say, we can use our institutions as a guide to tracking and hitting the mark for what it means to be a knowledge claim instead of mere opinion. Experimental philosophy challenges this approach on a few fronts. First, it challenges the assumption that empirical research into epistemology have no insight to offer. Two, the experiments that they conducted calls to question the traditional starting point of epistemology. Which is the introspective investigation of our institutions to arrive at a true account of knowledge and this intuition is universal. They suggest that their data collected indicates that the universal aspect of intuition based analysis is suspect. Variables such as socio economic background and level of education seem to connected to the kinds of institutions we make. That is, what one is really tracking when utilizing intuition as a guide is not a universal intuitive normative criteria for knowledge; instead it is tracking hyper local intuitions about knowledge.