Experimental ordinary language philosophy: a cross-linguistic study of defeasible default inferences

Abstract

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for 'critical' ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception ('argument from illusion'), suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for 'evidential' experimental philosophy.

Lingering stereotypes: Salience bias in philosophical argument

“…By combining pupillometry with plausibility ratings, our study provided evidence of inappropriate spatial inferences from epistemic uses of the verb “see,” which influence further cognition. Building on previous studies that used only output measures to study stereotypical inferences from perception and appearance verbs (Fischer & Engelhardt, , ; Fischer et al, ), it provides more rigorous support for the proposed Salience Bias Hypothesis (SBH): Case descriptions prompt inappropriate stereotypical inferences that influence further cognition when (i) they employ familiar polysemes (e.g., “see”) which have a clearly dominant sense, in a less salient sense, to describe cases which deviate from the dominant (e.g., seeing ) stereotype. Inappropriate inferences licensed only by the dominant sense then occur when (ii) these descriptions are processed by retaining and partially suppressing the dominant stereotype (e.g., the vision schema), rather than by activating a distinct stereotype (e.g., a knowledge schema).…”

“…The Salience Bias Hypothesis can be examined experimentally by identifying polysemous words and uses that satisfy conditions (i)–(iii) and deriving word‐specific hypotheses which can be experimentally tested, for example, with the cancellation paradigm (Section 2.1). Experiments using an outcome measure provided initial evidence for inappropriate spatial inferences from epistemic uses of “see” (Fischer & Engelhardt, ) and for inappropriate doxastic inferences from phenomenal uses of appearance‐verbs (Fischer & Engelhardt, ) and their robustness in the face of competing pragmatic inferences (Fischer et al, ). We now need further evidence from experiments that employ measures which tap into the underlying cognitive process (i.e., also use “process measures”); we also still need to garner evidence that thinkers know the inferences at issue are inappropriate.…”

“…To date, the “Sources Project” in experimental philosophy (see Footnote 1) focused on how automatic cognitive processes directly generate intuitive judgments that are explicitly endorsed, and sought to assess the evidentiary value of these intuitions by considering the reliability of the underlying processes. But stereotypical inferences can influence judgments about verbally described cases also indirectly, by leading to implicit conclusions that enter into the comprehender's tacit situation model on which subsequent judgment and reasoning about the case are based (Fischer et al, ; Saint‐Germier, ). The present study showed that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences can contribute to such situation models.…”

“…A recent call for an “experimental philosophy 2.0” (Nado, ) suggests this approach should be developed further and employed to assess not only intuitive judgments but also philosophical arguments (cf. Fischer, Engelhardt, Horvath & Ohtani, ).…”

Experiments on human incremental parsing

“…Usually, this concept is used with regard to language learning (especially reading learning), literary studies, nontrivial semantic and pragmatic comprehension, and logical inference, which requires full understanding of subtle context; see e.g. a recent paper by E. Fischer et al (2019). The aim of this work is to evaluate whether this is true for human comprehension of the syntactic structure of a text (as a matter of fact, of an individual sentence).…”