Interesting article at Prospect Magazine called Philosophy’s Great Experiment, about the rise of ‘experimental philosophy’. Doubly interesting to me, because it could equally well be talking about experimental economics, albeit a few years too late. Or about “neuroeconomics“; the philosophers in the article are using fMRI machines “to look for patterns of neuronal activity when subjects are presented with philosophical problems”, just like the researcher who does the same for resource allocation – economics – problems. But here’s the rub:
Some philosophers quietly dismiss the movement as a cynical step by researchers to appear cutting edge and to tap into scientists’ funding.
Indeed, it’s easy to feel this way about the kind of experiments in which economists step on psychologists’ toes. The drive toward empiricism in philosophy that the article talks about seems to be symptomatic of social sciences’ and humanities’ desire to be taken “seriously” as science.
And as we know, that means we need something falsifiable or verifiable. “There is no article in Prospect Magazine called Philosophy’s Great Experiment” is falsifiable, because I can find such an article and falsify the statement. “There is at least one article in Prospect Magazine called Philosophy’s Great Experiment” is verifiable, because I can find such an article and verify the statement.
In experimental economics, often it seems (at least to this observer) that we’re replicating, or at least mirroring, psychology experiments. Unfortunately, the economics experiment is much less likely to be “scientific”, not because of the method or the issue at hand, but because of the specific question. This is precisely what Lawrence Boland discusses in the paper “On the futility of criticizing the neoclassical maximization hypothesis” (pdf), which I read as a welcome withering put-down to all of those who claim to “disprove rationality“, etc etc. He says:
Properly stated, the neoclassical premise is: ‘For all decision makers there is something they maximize’… The person who assumed the premise is true can respond: ‘You claim you have found a consumer who is not a maximizer but how do you know there is not something which he is maximizing?’
For experimental economists and experimental philosophers alike, the challenge is to pose a scientific question; without that, no method will save us. “Are people ethical?”, for example, is equally a dead end as “are people rational?”.
Jim Campbell 