Is Experimental Philosophy Philosophically Significant ? ( Forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology )

Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to philosophy. In this paper, I defend the significance of experimental philosophy by defending the significance of intuitions – in particular, by defending their significance from a recent challenge advanced by Timothy Williamson.