A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design
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A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design Nat Hansen
Received: 20 February 2013 / Accepted: 20 February 2013 / Published online: 7 March 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs about the outcome of an experiment. Eliminating experimenter bias from context shifting experiments makes it far less obvious what the “intuitive” responses to those experiments are. After it is shown how those different kinds of bias can affect judgments about informal context shifting experiments, those experiments are revised to control for those forms of bias. The upshot of these investigations is that participants in the contextualist debate who employ informal experiments should pay just as much attention to the design of their experiments as those who employ more formal experimental techniques if they want to avoid obscuring the phenomena they aim to uncover. Keywords Contextualism · Experimental design · Experimental bias · Linguistic experiments · Intuitions · Metaphilosophy 1 Contextualism and experimental design: background “Contextualism” is the name for a family of semantic and pragmatic theories. For present purposes, contextualists can be grouped together in their rejection of the
N. Hansen (B) University of Reading, Berkshire, UK e-mail: [email protected]
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following minimalist claim about the interaction of context and linguistic meaning: Minimalism: The only effect that context has on the content of what is literally said by an utterance is that it determines the content of expressions in the “Basic Set” of obviously context sensitive expressions (see Cappelen and Lepore 2005, p. 2 for a list of items in the “Basic Set”).1 That is, contextualism (in the most inclusive sense) is committed to the existence of unobvious forms of context sensitivity. This is a descriptive claim—it is neutral between different ways of explaining context sensitivity that goes beyond the Basic Set.2 For example, unobvious forms of context sensitivity might be explained in terms of contextual “saturation” of variables that are part of the linguistic meaning of expressions, or in terms of “free enrichment” of the content of what is literally said (see Recanati 2004, p. 7 and pp. 23–25 for discussion of “saturation” vs. “free enrichment”). Contextualists of all stripes share an important methodological assumption with research in other areas of linguistic theory.
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