The Experimental Turn and Ordinary Language

Following the publication of Words and Things, Ernest Gellner’s 1959 polemic against what Bertrand Rusell described in his laudatory preface as ‘the linguistic philosophy now in vogue at Oxford’, the cluster of philosophers under attack placed a stronger emphasis on the multiplicity of their diverse aims, methods, and viewpoints (cf. Mehat 1963, part I). Those leading the relatively new movement in experimental philosophy have the good sense to highlight the diversity of their ambitions from the outset: Although the movement has a name, it includes a variety of projects driven by different interests, assumptions, and goals... While some experimental philosophers use data about ordinary intuitions to support philosophical theories, others use such data to better understand the psychological mechanisms that generate such intuitions, while still others gather such data to show that some intuitions may be too unreliable to support philosophical theories in the first place (Nadelhoffer and Nahmias: 123; cf. Knobe & Nicholls: Ch. 1). This essay is concerned only with that branch of experimental philosophy (X-Phi) that