Experimental Philosophy for Beginners

This graduate textbook provides a basic introduction to experimental philosophy (x-phi). In nine chapters, different methods and tools used in X-Phi are explained, spanning quantitative vignette studies, interactive experiments, corpus analysis, psycholinguistic experiments as well as qualitative interview studies. Each chapter introduces a specific experimental method by means of a case study in an easily accessible way and covers the whole research process from the development of a research question to the interpretation of the data.

Stephan Kornmesser is a research associate at the University of Oldenburg’s Department of Philosophy. His main areas of interest are philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and experimental philosophy. He is currently working on his research project “The Diversity of Scientific Concepts” (funded by the German Research Foundation). Recently, he co-edited “The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy” (de Gruyter 2023) and is co-author of “Wissenschaftstheorie. Eine Einführung” (Metzler 2020) and co-editor of “Die multiparadigmatische Struktur der Wissenschaften“ (Springer VS 2014).Alexander Max Bauer is a research associate at the University of Oldenburg’s Department of Philosophy, working primarily in experimental philosophy, where he is concerned with questions of distributive justice, causation, and speech act theory. Recently, he co-edited “The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy” (de Gruyter 2023), “Empirical Research and Normative Theory” (de Gruyter 2020), and “Philosophie zwischen Sein und Sollen” (de Gruyter 2019). Moreover, he is co-editor of the “Oldenburger Jahrbuch für Philosophie” (University of Oldenburg Press 2017ff.).Mark Alfano works in philosophy (epistemology, moral psychology), social science (personality and social psychology), and philosophy of technology (epistemology and ethics of algorithms, natural language processing and generation). He also brings digital humanities methods to bear on both contemporary problems and the history of philosophy (especially Nietzsche).Aurélien Allard is a philosopher of science and experimental philosopher, currently a post-doc at the École Normale Supérieure Paris. His two main areas of interest are theories of justice and the replicability crisis in social and biomedical sciences. After a Ph.D. on the idea of deservingness at the Université Paris 8, he conducted several post-docs at the University of California, Davis, the University of Geneva, and Sorbonne Université. He has recently published on the importance of basic needs and equality for perceptions of social justice, on the development of open science practices in psychology, and on the possibility of using nudges to promote scientific integrity.Lucien Baumgartner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Eccellenza-Team of Kevin Reuter at the University of Zurich. He works primarily in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, on projects both empirical and theoretical in nature. His research focuses on normative expressions in natural language, such as thick and thin terms, dual character terms, and normative generics. Lucien has extensive expertise in data science, especially with text data. He also works on integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods into the field of experimental philosophy. In his most recent research, Lucien has been studying the ways in which Large Language Models (LLMs) can be leveraged to investigate philosophical concept classes.Florian Cova is an assistant professor at the Univers