The Folk Probably do Think What you Think They Think

Abstract

Much contemporary experimental philosophy involves taking surveys of ‘folk’ subjects to test their intuitions involving philosophically relevant concepts. The results of these surveys are often claimed to be surprising, and treated as evidence that the relevant folk intuitions cannot be predicted from the ‘armchair’. We conducted an experiment to test these claims, and found that a solid majority of philosophers could predict even results that were claimed to be surprising in the literature. We discuss some methodological implications as well as some possible explanations for the common surprisingness claims.