Summary |
Experimental epistemology brings empirical methods to bear on epistemic issues---concerning knowledge, justification, belief, and so forth. Example questions include: Do ordinary speakers treat the truth of knowledge attributions as shifting depending on the context of utterance? Do our intuitions about whether someone is justified change with the order in which the case is presented in relation to others? These questions are often at least partly empirical, so we can address them by using methods more familiar from the social sciences. We can, for example, provide ordinary subjects with different hypothetical scenarios, gathering their immediate judgments about the cases (e.g. whether they agree or disagree that a protagonist in a vignette knows some proposition). By probing ordinary intuitions in different experimental settings, we can gain a clearer understanding of how people ordinarily think about knowledge and related phenomena. Experimental epistemologists also address methodological issues such as whether ordinary epistemic judgments are unstable or vary across cultures, and if so whether those judgments should be trusted. |