Abstract
Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal reasoning – including philosophical arguments. The evidential strand of experimental philosophy uses mainly questionnaire-based methods to assess the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments that are adduced as evidence for philosophical theories and as premises for philosophical arguments. Extending this prominent strand of experimental philosophy, EAA underpins such assessments, extends the scope of the assessments, and expands the range of the empirical methods employed: EAA examines how automatic inferences that are continually made in language comprehension and production shape verbal reasoning, and draws on findings about comprehension biases that affect the contextualisation of such default inferences, in order to explain and expose fallacies. It deploys findings to assess premises and inferences from premises to conclusions, in philosophical arguments. To do so, it adapts methods from psycholinguistics and recruits methods from computational linguistics.
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Notes
- 1.
The program’s proponents – who include the present authors – have cheekily appropriated a simple but broad label for a quite specific research program that focuses on how automatic default inferences from words influence verbal reasoning. Important work that does not share this specific focus but could well also be described as ‘experimental argument analysis’ includes work on fallacies in reasoning with conditionals (Pfeifer, 2012; Pfeifer & Tulkki, 2017, cf. Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2019) and with metaphors (e.g., Ervas et al., 2015, 2018).
- 2.
- 3.
That information is ‘activated’ means that it is made more readily available for use in further cognitive processes. Information activated by a verbal stimulus thereby becomes more readily available for processes ranging from word recognition (e.g., recognising the next word) to sentence parsing (e.g., assigning thematic roles like agent and patient) and verbal reasoning.
- 4.
Arguably, this step assumes a dichotomous distinction between ‘physical objects’ and ‘sense-data’, whereby any non-physical object of vision is a private sense-datum.
- 5.
For helpful discussion of DS in this volume, see Chap. 5 on this volume.
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Fischer, E., Herbelot, A. (2023). How Understanding Shapes Reasoning: Experimental Argument Analysis with Methods from Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics. In: Bordonaba-Plou, D. (eds) Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28908-8_12
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