Accentuate the Negative

There are a number of different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”, and our interest here is to drive a wedge of contention between two of them. These two programs concern traditional analytic philosophy’s practice of appealing to philosophical intuitions as either evidence for (or against) philosophical claims or data both about the nature of our folk philosophical concepts and judgments and about the nature of the domains in which we make those judgments. According to what is sometimes called experimental philosophy’s “negative program”, experimental philosophy challenges the usefulness of this practice. According to experimental philosophy’s “positive program”, experimental philosophy is (at least an indispensable part of) the proper methodology for this practice. In this paper, we contend that the practice of appealing to intuitions, even as modified by the positive program, still faces significant challenges from the results of the negative program.