Experimental Philosophy is a relatively recent movement that questions the supposedly traditional philosophical methodology. Traditional philosophers, according to experimentalists, use exclusively their own judgments to determine whether the consequences of the principles they defend, or attack, are intuitively correct, and they do so usually via mental experiments in which they try to gauge what, according to the principles in question, one would have to say in the conditions described in the hypothetical scenario. Experimental philosophers, on the other hand, advocate the collection of data through surveys that elicit the intuitive judgments of subjects, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, in order to test the adequacy of theoretical principles or claims. The impact of the new movement has been quite strong and has generated an intense debate on the role of intuitions in Philosophy, whose intuitions should count, and why. Even though this debate affects all philosophical domains, the focus of our project lies in the field of semantics. We will develop two research lines. The first research line will be the semantics of general terms, both kind terms and terms for artifacts. The second will cope with the characterization of the type of circularity which produce semantic paradoxes. In both research lines, a central concern will be the discussion of the role played by intuitions and experimental data in philosophical theorizing.
Total budget: 74,700
1 predoctoral FPI scholarship
