The Need for Measure Calibration in Experimental Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract Experimental philosophy purports to investigate folk intuitions about a wide array of topics. But can we be sure that the measures used by experimental philosophers succeed in capturing the intuitions they were intended to? Such questions about the content validity of measures in experimental philosophy have been at the heart of many methodological debates. In this chapter, my first goal is to argue that calibration methods—the fact of using measures on control cases in which we already know what participants’ answers should be if the measure is reliable—constitute a powerful, albeit underused, tool to make progress on such methodological debates. My second goal is then to show that calibration methods can also prove valuable when trying to improve existing measures. Thus, through three original studies, I show how calibration methods can be used to improve existing measures of participants’ intuitions about the objectivity of certain truths.