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Fischer, Eugen 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2088-1610 and Engelhardt, Paul E.
(2019)
Eyes as Windows to Minds: Psycholinguistics for Experimental Philosophy.
In:
Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy.
Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 43-100.
ISBN 9781350068995
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Abstract
Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024) Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Wittgenstein Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > UEA Experimental Philosophy Group |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Aug 2018 09:30 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Sep 2024 12:46 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/68165 |
| DOI: |
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