 Okay, so hello, I'm JJ Waheen and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for this episode is Experimental Philosophical Laws, right? 21st century saw the boom of a new approach in doing philosophy that aims to answer philosophical questions using the methods of the sciences, especially the social sciences. Now, this approach has a cool sounding name as well, X5, which is short for experimental philosophy. Now, one field that has benefited from X5 approach is logic, and to share his thoughts on experimental philosophical logic and why it matters, we have Dave Ripley, a philosopher in logition from Monash University. So, hello, Dave. Welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hey, good to see you JJ. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, let's start with, so before getting into experimental philosophical logic, let's try to get a handle of what experimental philosophy is. So what is X5 and does it matter anyway? Yeah, I think there's been, there are a few ways maybe to understand this. One way to think about X5, I saw you showed the logo of the burning arm chair and before there was this sort of movement, maybe there still is this movement in some circles of people sort of identifying themselves as experimental philosophers and thinking we do X5 and we will overturn the bad old ways of doing philosophy with the power of experiment. And the sort of burning arm chair logo is meant to convey this idea, right, of the sort of the sitting in your study in your arm chair and pondering the deep truths of reality is a symbol of the bad old way of doing philosophy. And so that would be burned, I don't think literally burned, but you know, we would get rid of the bad old way of doing things and we'd take philosophy to the streets and talk to people about their actual philosophical concerns and so on. I, so there was this moment of like an X5 movement that was sort of identifiable as a movement. There's a manifesto and I feel like, you know, you can't be a proper movement without a manifesto. So it's good that there's a manifesto and such things of that. And I was a bit sort of young and adjacent to that movement, right. So I learned from a lot of those folks, particularly Josh Noble was one of my teachers and I learned a great deal from him, but I was never really kind of part of that sort of thrust. I've always been a, you know, in the air kind of fellow traveler. And it's been interesting to see Josh and my experience of Josh was never a sort of hostile, we will ruin everything sort of experimental philosophy. He was always much more interested in, at least in my experience, right, in making these connections with other ways of doing philosophy and seeing what light experimental methods could shed on the kinds of problems that philosophers have been interested in for a very, very long time. And so my own picture of X5 is strongly shaped in that sort of way. So I don't approach it in a particularly combative way. I don't think of it as a way of getting rid of other ways of doing philosophy. I tend to think of it more as adding a tool to the toolkit. So lots of philosophers these days do not run experiments themselves, but more and more, some philosophers do run experiments themselves. And if you're going to be running experiments in the course of a philosophical investigation, it pays to be reflective about what that experiment, I mean, both about the design of the experiment, but about what sorts of questions are productively explored through experiment and what sorts of questions are productively explored in other ways. And so there are a lot of X5 discussion about X5 lives in that space in terms of thinking about, well, what sorts of experiments are going to be useful to us? What sorts of experiments are going to be fruitful for exploring the philosophical questions that we're interested in? And so that's maybe one way to think of X5 is as this sort of bringing experimental method into philosophy. And the reason for all that we have to think about the burning armchair is I think it's important to note that bringing the experimental method in is giving one more option for ways to pursue questions. And I and I think many folks are of the view that you should pursue each question with the methods that are best suited for that question. And sometimes that will involve experimental methods. And so experimental philosophy is a way of engaging with experiments in philosophy that I've learned a lot from and I think it can be a very valuable tool in the toolkit rather than a sort of radical new break with the way things have been done in the 20th century or something like, you know, there are people who would say something about breaks, but I think it's just another another arrow in the quiver and a nice one to have. Okay, so let's let's try to back up a bit. So originally conceived, it's the X5 is a movement against the armchair philosophy or traditional way of doing philosophy. But as time goes by, some philosophers, X5 philosophers themselves are thinking that, well, perhaps you could be friendlier in terms of we could use the tools of the social sciences or experimental tools to help in thinking about the philosophical questions. So you're going for that view as well. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to make any claims too firmly about the sort of history of X5 and what came earlier and what came later in X5 because I'm just I don't know the history well enough to be making those claims. But it's certainly true that a lot of the early attention to it a lot of the sort of buzz around X5, I think was created by that that very combative tone. And my sense is that that a lot of that that combative tone has sort of died down these days and and things are much more integrated with non experimental philosophy. Okay, so why does it matter to have this kind of way of doing philosophy? Um, well, I think one natural way to think about it is to think about There's kind of a risk if you don't have this. Right, so there's certain questions that you might be exploring. In my own case, the questions that have brought me to these sorts of methods are largely questions about how language works, how human languages work, and you can worry that if you, you know, there are various tools that you can bring to exploring these sorts of methods, but there's a risk that things might come kind of unhinged from the reality you're trying to study it in ways, right? And as as you get more and more theory building on theory building on theory building on theory, it's nice to be able to sort of check back in and say, Okay, well, what about the phenomenon that our theories are meant to apply to? Is our theory sort of going and drift and falling away from it? Or should we check back in? And so one thing that is drew me to sort of experimental methods very early on was in terms of thinking about vague predicates, things that sort of come in degrees and where no clear line can be drawn. So you think about things and you ask, Well, are those things near each other or not? Right? There's typically you'd think, Okay, well, you know, they're all the way out here at the edges of the frame, they're not near each other. They're all the way here, then my hands are near each other. But where do they go from near to not near? There's not like a sudden point that leaps out at us as a place where they go from near to not. And one thing that I think is relatively common to hear people say, So think about things that are sort of in this area where we don't know what to say. We say, Are they near or not near? I really feel comfortable with either of those ways of putting it. One thing people will sometimes say is, Well, they're near and they're not near. And that has the surface form of a contradiction of saying something and saying it's negation at the same time. And so that's just a thing that I was a great people said because I'm a person who talks to people, right? That's like you, you know, you hear people say such things, you notice that people say such things, that's part of, that's a phenomenon that happens. But what I saw in a lot of the logical literature on vagueness was in many places even claims that this doesn't happen. And, you know, people saying, Well, of course, no one would ever assert something like be a not pay. So we need to think about this in some other way. So you have in these philosophical arguments, bearing argumentative way claims about what people would or wouldn't say. And those claims are sometimes just mistaken, right? They're not actually in touch with what people are saying, but are instead drawing on, you know, layers and layers of theory. And so one of the things that first drew me to experimental methods was providing a way to overcome. So I have discussions with philosophers and I would say things like, but people do say things like both near and not near. And, and so often the response in conversation would be like, No, they don't. And so it was like, Okay, well, I guess I need to go out and actually, you know, look, I, you know, I've asked 100 people and here's what they said, you know, to actually sort of compile those. And that kind of evidence to be able to to respond to what seemed to me to just be kind of false empirical claims that had crept into had crept into the literature. So I don't think that's the only way that one can come to be interested in experimental methods or the only way that these things could matter. But for me, that was what brought me in and that was why I thought there was something of value here. That was a way of sort of bringing theories back in touch with the reality that it would have to be studying. Okay, so we're touching on your field experimental philosophical logic. So how does experimental philosophy have to do with logic? What does X Phi doing here, what aspect of logic is open to an X Phi approach? Yeah, so, so there's a million different ways to do logic. And I think probably only some of them are going to be amenable to experimental methods. But as I said, what drew me in was was studying these sort of vague words, these words that have difficulty around boundaries. Excuse me. And so when you think about the use of logic in those areas, I see it basically as continuous with a formal semantics of the kind done in many linguistics departments. My undergraduate degree was in linguistics. I came into philosophy on the school. So that's my sort of background was coming from that from a semantic side of things. And so you see logical tools get used in in semantics and in syntax. But in this case, I'm thinking mostly about that pretty, pretty frequently people are using these sorts of logical tools. So one of the applications that you see in the thing of philosophical logic, right, or logic done by philosophers, or logic done for the sake of exploring philosophical questions or however you would want to understand what philosophical logic. The uses of logic that get made here are very often like this. Actually applications to natural language directly to modeling and understanding natural language. Sometimes they're modeling and understanding other sorts of phenomena like reasoning. But very, very often, right, these are using logics to model some particular phenomena. And if you're using logics to build models of some phenomenon, well, you need to study the logic sort of in its own right. Formal properties of logic and define things clearly improve theorems. And you know, these are not particularly experimental methods, right? These are the methods of mathematics, more or less, to build the logic and set up the logic the way you want it to go. But you also need to explore the phenomenon to learn, well, what am I trying to build a model of? And if I'm not there yet, if my model does one thing, but the phenomenon does some other thing, well, what's the, how do I understand that mismatch? How do I understand what I'm trying to capture so that I can build a model that better captures it? And so that for me is one of the core ways that experimental methods can get involved, particularly in philosophical logic, in looking at this relationship between building a formal model of a real world phenomenon and thinking what we would use experiment to enhance our picture of the real world phenomenon so that we can build better models of it. Okay, so in your work, Experimental Philosophical Logic, an article which was published in the companion to Experimental Philosophy, so you mentioned that there are two types of ways of thinking about logic, pure logic on the one hand, so you're talking about the mathematical modeling here and applied logic. That is, you're trying to look at a phenomenon like reasoning about vagueness or whatnot and you apply the X, Y approach to applied logic. So I'm thinking you discussed about two layers here, so the data of experimental philosophical logic and the logic itself. So what's the relationship between these two, the data itself and the logic that talks about the data? Yeah, I mean it's, you know, I don't really know what logic is, other than like this sort of broad field of study that I do. And yeah, I mean, obviously not just me, there's tons of people do it, but like, you know, that field of study, and the best I can do to explain logic is by extension, right, I say, oh, it's that thing. Yeah, it's what we're doing over here. And so in some sense, you know, the relationship between the sort of more mathematical side of things, the things that works by methods like definition and proof and, you know, theorem and counter example and things of that, those sorts of methods and the methods that work by experiment and statistics and sort of compiling things up, these are, I think an important sense, these are sort of both logic, right, they're both part of the kind of thing that we do as philosophical logicians, right, is think about the phenomena. But there's another sense in which people use logic where they mean kind of like just the first thing, you know, not this sort of experiment stuff, but the stuff that looks like math. And so if we think about the relationship between these two hands, it's not, I don't think it's a straightforward or obvious one at all. I think it's a very difficult question, and it's a question that I would like to understand better than I do. I think it's a very difficult sort of way to think through it. I suppose I come at it, I've found it productive in many ways to just sort of be as naive as possible about it and not at all to deny the complications. I mean, I think it's actually a really difficult question. But you know, sometimes it's nice to take a really difficult question and just be naive about it and see where you can get. And so, you know, so I try to do things like, okay, well, there's these sort of things that people say, like, you know, these things are near and not near to each other. And then we have these formal systems that we prove things about. And you know, they include these various kinds of symbols that often there's, you know, the thing we call formal conjunction. Sometimes we say that that has something to do with natural language words like and and this thing that we call formal negation. Sometimes we say that has something to do with natural language words like not. And again, the nature of the relation, I think is a mess here and I don't want to oversimplify things. But I think it can be productive sometimes to ask, you know, what if we just treat them as the same and see what happens? You know, what if we what if we model this sentence that, you know, someone is agreeing to in a survey as you know, the circle is near the square and the circle is not near the square. And what if we just model that as P and not P and where the and and not between P and R, right, artifacts of the formal language, the thing that is sort of clearly defined and treated in certain ways. And we say, OK, well, now what if we then apply the tools of our formalism to see how should that sentence behave? For example, maybe with respect to its truth values or if we're dealing with a formal pragmatics, maybe with respect to, you know, conditions under which people would assert it or its effects on the context, if it were asserted or things like that, right? We apply our sort of formal tools and see, well, how would that formal token behave? And you see things like, well, in some logics, that formal token is sort of just always false. Or if we have degrees of falsity, it's always completely false in some context or some formal treatment, so it's never any good. It doesn't matter whether you're in a borderline case, whether you're in a clear case, it's just always terrible. And then you look at what people say, and you say, well, actually, people seem to use this sentence. They don't seem to like it unless you're in a borderline case, right? People seem to use this sentence to draw a distinction. And they're drawing a distinction between borderline cases where they do like this kind of sentence or where they like this kind of sentence more and non-borderline cases, whether clear yeses or clear noes, whether they don't like this kind of sentence much at all. So you might think, OK, well, do we have formal systems that exhibit that kind of pattern? Right, that take this sort of formal token and say, OK, well, it's better in some way, more true, more assertible, whatever. There's better in some kind of way in this middle ground than it is outside of the middle ground. And we do have such systems. So this is the kind of evaluation that I'm imagining going back and forth, right? I'm kind of being deliberately naive about the connection between them and then just trying to compare patterns and saying sort of what patterns do we see in reality and to what extent can we imitate those patterns on the formal side? To what extent can we make the results of our formal theory look something like the phenomenon that we're interested in exploring? With the hope that if we can get alignment in certain respects, then something illuminating will come from that, that we'll be able to look at the formal side of things and say, ah, they line up because this formalism is somehow capturing some aspect of what's really happening. And we might only discover what aspect that is farther down the line, right? This is kind of the deliberate naivety, it's a sort of investigative strategy. I don't want to start out assuming that I understand how this formalism is meant to connect to the phenomenon. I think rather let's try to get them to line up and then maybe if we can get them lining up in certain ways, then we'll learn something about why that is. So that's largely a hope and that's largely unilluminating because I think it's a really, really hard question. And as I said, I try to just sort of postpone the question as long as I possibly can and get other things done in the meantime. Actually, I'm thinking that your view about X-Fi logic is something to do with how sciences work, right? So in natural sciences, you have certain models and those models try to represent phenomenon. Then you check whether, well, here's a model that describes this phenomenon and this model does not really describe this phenomenon. So let's go for this model. Is that the thing that you're working here? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, as I said, my sort of early training in a lot of this stuff came from a linguistics department. It was from a linguistics department that was very, you know, self-consciously, you know, a sort of broadly Chomsky and linguistics as a science kind of mold. And that was one of my early training and that still definitely shapes how I think about this sort of stuff. Yeah, so I very much am conceiving of it as, you know, I mean, it's a, we are at the softest of soft sciences over here. But definitely taking that sort of broadly scientific method to it is, or the broadly scientific way of understanding what we're up to is certainly something that's in the background for me. Okay, so do you think that X, Y logic would deliver a verdict on issues in philosophical logic? For example, could it resolve the issue between logical monists and logical pluralists? Let me draw a quick distinction and this is going to be rough and ready. And I, you know, it's a distinction you could put all kinds of pressure on and justifiably. But let me draw a quick distinction between on the one hand what I want to call philosophical logic and on the other hand what I would want to call philosophy of logic. So both of these are going to be activities largely engaged in by philosophers. They're going to be activities that involves logic in various ways. And like I said, there won't be any sort of clear or sharp line between them. But I have in mind basically a difference between two tendencies. On the one sort of tendency you've got sort of let's use logic to answer various philosophical questions or use logic maybe together with a bunch of other tools to answer these philosophical questions. So you have your questions like a variety of paradox which connects the problems of vagueness that I was talking to earlier, questions about conditionals, right? I mean, both of those are philosophical questions go back thousands of years in terms of how we should think about language in connection with both vagueness and conditionals. And the tools of logic that we have are useful for thinking about those sorts of questions. But there's also this thing that you want to do where you look at the tools of logic themselves and you say, the heck is going on with those? How do they work? What are they, right? There's this phenomenon of logic and it is itself deserving of philosophical study. And so here, and you might use the tool, this is part of why the distinction I think is not so clear, right, is you might use the tools logic to answer philosophical questions that are questions about logic as well. But in some sense, you needn't be using the tools of logic in order to answer questions about logic. So if we think of, just rough and ready, think a philosophy of logic is philosophical questions about logic and philosophical logic as answering philosophical questions through the use of logic, right? Then you see that it's at least possible to do one of these and not the other or the other of these and not the one. And so I tend to think of the uses I tend to think of experimental philosophical logic as most useful for are for these uses where we're applying logic, where logic is part of what we're doing. Because very, very often that's a case where we have a phenomenon and build a model of it and so you experimentally explore the phenomenon is relatively clear to see how that would come together. Cases where the logic is itself the topic of investigation we're asking philosophical questions about logic and I take the monism pluralism question that you point to to be one of these and this is why I went through that whole rigmarole. These are questions on the whole I just think a lot less about these questions are less informed about these questions. I myself really struggle to see what is at stake in the monism pluralism debate. I feel like as the years go on I'm coming to understand it better and better largely due to the work of Teresa Corey Kissel who I think is doing great work in this sort of debate and is someone I've learned a lot from in terms of understanding even what the debate is about. But it's not something that I have a great deal of perspective on that's for sure. And it's something that I would say I don't see any obvious way for experimental methods to inform say the debate between logical monists and logical pluralists, but I wouldn't say with any confidence that they can't. As I say largely I actually just really struggle to sort of understand a lot of what that debates about. So I wouldn't want to rule out experimental methods there I would leave that question to the people who actually are experts in the debate between monism and pluralism, but I myself mostly steer clear of that debate. And you know I'm, I'm, I mean, here's a here's another way to think about it here's here's an analogy. Think about mathematical structures of all sorts think about arithmetic right think about addition and multiply dividing right you can use those sorts of tools in answering all kinds of questions you might have. Or you could make them the subject of philosophical investigation in their own right. And if you want to use the addition say to model combining things you know about the combination right if I have two apples and I put them next to three apples then I have five apples great. But if I have two cups of vinegar and three cups of baking soda and I put them together. I'm not necessarily going to get five cups of anything because the combination is going to change. So addition is addition it holds still but it's good for modeling some phenomenon of combination and it's not for model other phenomena of combination and we need to know about the phenomena of combination, which we learn about by trying it and seeing what happens in order to know how to apply addition. On the other hand if when we come to think about like what is addition really you know do numbers genuinely exist or they mere mental constructs or they something else. It might be trickier to see how to use experimental methods to explore those questions at least directly and I tend to think that something analogous to that is going on in the case of logic as well. Okay, so I think you're being consistent because I've asked you this question. Oh, I'm sorry about that. You made a grave accusation. Okay, because I asked you this question in the 2015 AAL. Oh no, what did I say then? The same answer that you have now. That tells you is that I haven't learned anything. Okay, so let's get to your work with your collaborators Ole Grig, Kuberos and Van Roy. Okay, so you've been mentioning about the philosophy of vagueness and the use of X phylogic to understand this. So let's go for this one a bit more. So can you describe the work for us and the results that you have? Yeah, so the work that I've done on vagueness with, so Kuberos at all, Ole Grig, me and Robert Van Roy, we published a number of different papers on vagueness and on truth, exploring things from different angles around. We haven't actually done any experiments ourselves, that is, as a group. What we have looked at experimental work, either that other people have done or that some of us have done in other combinations in terms of understanding this sort of thing. Where the experimental stuff that I've mostly been involved in on that one, either my own or Ole Grig and I and Santer del have a paper doing some experimental work that Kuberos said I'll look at. The sort of work we've done in that area, and all at least has done other experimental work in the area as well together we journeyed there. Yeah, I mean there's, you know, us, like, as a person have done experimental work, just not with us as the list of authors. It's largely been, in terms of thinking about this, these sort of, let me call in order, like, one prediction that they have a name for them. Sorry, Dave, I can't hear you. Yeah, can you hear me now? It's... The volume is, yeah, volume. Is there anything on this end? Maybe your mic. Yeah. Can I change my volume? I wonder, I'm just going to keep telling me if this is working. Yeah, that's working out. That's working now? Okay. Excellent. Sorry about that. Not sure what that was. So the work that we've often been interested in interpreting has been, we've tended to build logical models that have different sort of thresholds of satisfaction or different sort of thresholds where a sentence can get a thumbs up, maybe different levels of truth, maybe different levels of assertibility. There might be, you know, there's questions about how to interpret it, but we've got these sort of multi-level logical frameworks. And so you would say things like, so think about the question whether someone is tall. And we'll start to say, okay, well, that actually is setting two thresholds that there's not a move from tall to not tall, just directly all at once. There's rather a separate borderline and the clear cases are outside that. And the two notions of satisfaction that we bring to bear, right? One, something satisfied, strictly or satisfied in the stricter or tighter sense. If it's outside the borderline and tall, and something satisfied tolerantly, if it's either strictly satisfied or else it's in the borderline, right? So borderline is satisfied tolerantly, but not strictly. And then if something's not even in the borderline, right, then it's not tall at all. It's not satisfied in either sense. So we've got this sort of multi-layer structure going on on the formalism side. And part of what this helps us understand or what this helps us bring a logical model to is a phenomenon that, as far as I know, was first reported by San Auti and Jeffrey Pelletier, which is a phenomenon of people agreeing in borderline cases. And I use tall because their experiment was on the case tall. People agreeing for borderline cases of tall with the claim that the person in that borderline case is both tall and not tall. So that's something we looked at before, and that's something that has been seen in a few different kinds of experiments. But what Alkotip and Pelletier show is that you also have the very same people who are saying, yes, that person is tall and not tall. You say, is that person tall? No. Is that person not tall? No. So what you've got in these cases is people agreeing with a conjunction, agreeing with both tall and not while disagreeing with both conjuncts. Disagreeing, so are they tall? No. Are they not tall? No. But are they both? Yes. So this is a puzzling phenomenon for certain theories of conjunction, in fact, from all theories of conjunction. And one thing that Cobrera said all have put together as a potential approach to this or a potential model of this uses these two thresholds that I described earlier, the strict and the tolerant threshold. Think that there's something going on here where there's a sort of default when people are sort of making unmarked utterances. There's a default to understand these as strict. So if someone's outside the borderline, it would be wrong to say that they're tall because that would most naturally be interpreted as saying that they're above the strict threshold that they're pretty tall. And it's not so if they're outside the borderline. And similarly, it would be, sorry, that's not so if they're inside the borderline. Yeah, right. They're not above the strict threshold. If they're inside the borderline, it would be wrong to say that they're strictly tall. Similarly, it would be wrong to say they're strictly not tall if they're inside the borderline because you have to be strictly not tall, you have to be below the sort of lower threshold. So that we would use to explain the disagreement with the claim that the person is tall and the claim that the person is not tall. On the other hand, it's impossible on our sort of formalism for anyone to be strictly tall and strictly not tall, right? You'd have to be outside the borderline above it and outside the borderline below it. It's just not going to happen. So we've proposed a process where when someone says so and so is tall and not tall, the hearer is not going to interpret them as having said it strictly. And because then they would have said something that's not going to be strictly tall. On the other hand, it is possible to be tolerant like both tall and not tall, right? If you're inside the borderline, well, you're above the lower threshold, so you're tall and you're below the lower threshold, so you're not tall, at least if we take these things tolerantly. And so these sort of two threshold models that we've built together with an assumption that people sort of default to the stricter threshold and retreat from that default when it wouldn't make sense to hold to it. Those seem to stick quite nicely with some of the experimental data. So we pointed to that actually in our first paper together. We pointed to that basically at roughly this level of specificity. And what we've done in some later work is build some formal models of that pragmatic phenomenon of the assuming strict as a default and retreating when necessary. Sort of saying that's one of the things that we've explored in ongoing work is not just saying it at this level of, well, there's this default and then we retreat. But actually taking that default retreat structure itself into the formalism and trying to build precise models of exactly how does that default function and exactly how does that retreat function. So that's one place where experimental work has really informed the kinds of models that we've built when thinking about big terms. Okay, that's interesting. So for you guys, you have the idea that there's a strict truth and a tolerant truth. So the strict truth will be, if it's not in the borderline case, you could either be strictly true or it could either be strictly false that someone is But if it is in the borderline case, it's, well, tolerantly it's both. He saw it not all. Is that what's going on here in the logic? Yeah, you could understand it in terms of strict truth and tolerant truth, if you wanted to. I'm one of the reasons I'm being a bit cagey here is just that and this always happens with co authored work, you know, there's There's things that we all agree on and there's things that we don't agree on. And I'm, I'm so speaking only for myself, although this is stuff that I've learned through this collaborative work. But I just don't want to, you know, don't want to put them on the hook for things that I'm saying. And so speaking only for myself. I'm a little worried about using the language of strict truth and tolerant truth, not because I think it goes wrong in the case of things I think if all you cared about was vagueness and you wanted to go forward like that it would basically be no different from from what I would rather say it would all work out fine. But I also want to use the same kind of machinery to understand things like the lyre paradox, a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. And, you know, to say that that sentence itself is better than the tolerant threshold, but not as good as this. Right, it's not that it's a borderline case necessarily but it's a different way of making it to this in between kind of status. And if you have these notions of tolerant and strict truth around, you can do it in a way that works out but like because the truth is now part of the phenomenon we're studying at all, it becomes a bit of a tank basically. And so, so I'm just cagey about notions of tolerant and strict truth, because I think they can cause some trouble if they're not handled in just the right way when it comes to thinking about these other sorts of paradoxes. But for purposes of vagueness, I don't think there's any trouble at all with thinking in terms of tolerance, strict truth, it's just I worry a little bit about thinking that that's the only possible interpretation. I think you can understand this stuff without those notions, but they're they're perfectly workable notions for these purposes. Okay, that's that's good to hear. But what I like about what you're doing with your collaborators or will be this so you're taking into consideration the experimental data. So you mentioned about the pelletier and exetive experiments. You also mentioned about the Williamson experiments in your work. Ah, yep. Well, the Bonini at all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there's this sort of team of psychologists and Williamson joined in with them for. Yeah, they tell you. Maybe that's some of the earliest experimental philosophy on vagueness that that I know of that that was sort of before the Russian a lot of the stuff like in my own work in the exit even pelletier and so on is is responding to that. Bonini, which is which is worth a read. Right. So yeah. So what I like about what you're doing as as experimental philosophical logicians is that you're considering here's the target phenomenon people think this way. And we need a logic that describes this. So is that the way you're thinking about logic in experimental philosophical logic? More or less. I'm I'm myself. I don't I'm more interested in how people talk than in how they think. Okay. Obviously, these are related to each other, right? It's not. They're not completely independent sort of things. But I'm just myself more fascinated by phenomena to do with language than phenomena to do with thought. Although, of course, right, these are interconnected. So yeah, so yeah, if I can substitute talk for thinking what you said, then I'm just totally on. I know you're worried about you're worried about philosophy of mind stuff and philosophy of language stuff as well. Okay. So what other work is being done under the banner of ex philogic and how are they contributing to philosophical logic? One of the things that's been happening more recently that I think is really interesting is and I think there's room for for much more work here than this is has yet been done is looking at experimental work on on conditionals in general and on counterfactual conditionals in particular. So why on counterfactual conditionals in particular why on you know if it if it were that this then it would have been matter if it had been that this then it would have been that why why counterfactual conditionals in particular. One is just the philosophers have had a lot more trouble understanding counterfactuals. And if you look at sort of philosophical literature on conditionals, a lot of it kind of lingers around counterfactuals in very puzzling ways. And so this is a sign that it would be nice to sort of get a picture of what's going on here. Another place or to zoom in still further and thinking about counterfactuals. I think one place that's that's sort of right for exploration, some of which exploration is is being done. And is thinking about counterfactuals with impossible antecedents. So thinking about, you know, if I don't know which things are impossible and which things aren't impossible. But you know, supposing supposing for example that that some things material constitution is a necessary property of it, which is the thing that some people think, you know, then you get counterfactuals like well if this table if the table in front of me were made out of stone. It would be heavier than it is that seems true. If this table in front of me were made out of stone, it would be the same weight that it is. It seems false because it's actually made out of very light wood. And so it's so we seem to have these sorts of judgments about these conditionals according to some people who think that material constitution is necessary, right, these have impossible antecedents. But if you don't think that material constitution is necessary, then just pick some different thing that you do think is necessary right and substitute that in right that's just about choosing a right example. And you get these sorts of many existing theories of counterfactuals have the consequence that all of these any counterfactual with an impossible antecedent is true. And this just seems wrong. It seems wrong to almost everybody. Nobody looks at that and thinks oh yes that's absolutely that seems right. The question is what to make of this. And so there's different different ways that people who endorse these theories who have this counterintuitive consequence there are different ways that people who endorse these theories have tried to defend it. But as far as I know, the standard defenses of this kind of theory, all themselves make pretty concrete empirical hypotheses about how people deal with counterfactuals. So David Lewis, for example, excuse me in the book counterfactuals, where he endorses a theory that has this this consequence and he considers this constantly says you know this has the the verdict that all kind of factuals with impossible antecedents are true. And that might seem wrong. But what he actually says is that we don't want to call all such counterfactuals true, but also it's we don't want to call them false either. Right so he says it's not that we have the intuition that certain of these are false it's not that we judge that it's false that if this table were made out of stone, and it would weigh the same as it currently does. It's rather just or you know, he wouldn't accept that as an impossibility but you know pick again just substitute in whatever impossibility and it's rather just that we don't want to assert things that have impossible antecedents. Right so he wants to give a an interpretation not in terms of being false, but rather in terms of, you know, we might have all kinds of reasons not to assert something other than judging it to be false. So this is pretty directly a hypothesis about what people judge. And so, you know, it becomes straightforwardly testable a truths value judgment task is one of the standard kinds of experimental tasks that you would give right you present people with sentences about circumstances and you ask them to judge the truth value of the sentence to judge whether it's true or false or so on and people certainly can tell the difference between something that's false and something that's irrelevant or one thing like that, you know, if I just said out of blue right now, you know two plus three is five. Like that's weird it would be strange for me to assert that and people would recognize that but no one's going to say oh that was a false thing that you said because it was strange to assert. And so the sort of Lewis hypothesis right that we don't judge these to be false is itself open to empirical exploration right so that's a pretty and there are other hypotheses that people have given about why people would be startled by the prediction that that all counter possible conditionals are true. But every explanation that I know of. Right is it is trying to explain the intuition right that if people come to this and they they say well that seems like a weird prediction. And so, okay what if you think the predictions right then you owe some explanation as to why people think it's weird. And those explanations are as I say everyone that I know of is itself empirically explorable. So that I think is a real avenue for future work here. I think that especially because so much of the debate around counter possibles is just sort of spinning its wheels, you know there's people still publishing stuff about counter possible conditionals and arguing back for us and oh they're all true and oh no they're not no they're all true and oh no they're not. Like I you know I include myself in this like there's not yet I haven't seen too many new arguments about that right I mean a lot of this stuff was sort of. It was all hashed out in the 90s and we're just repeating ourselves at this point and so bringing some empirical methods to the table is actually I think a potential avenue for opening up new angles for pushing something forward for actually having some genuinely new. Something new in view where we aren't just sort of you know repeating what the last generation said. Okay that's fair. Okay so let's go to do some worries about X, Y and X, Y logic in particular. So one worry about X, Y is whether this approach is even philosophical. So for example psychologists are already investigating the mechanisms of reasoning perception and so on so how is X, Y different from what psychologists are doing. Yeah I mean I am I'm glad you asked this I think it's it's you know when you think about work that draws on varying methodologies or that spans various sorts of disciplines. I think there are a couple of different ways that people can conceptualize this this sort of work one way that people sometimes think about it is like. Okay well each discipline has a sort of wall around it and it's very important that people who are in that discipline don't cross that wall. Right you know if you say okay well experimental methods those don't make it into the philosophy wall right there aren't we and so if anyone does something that involves experimental methods then what they're doing is not philosophy. Right because it's you know they've stepped outside the philosophy wall and you know I'm obviously characterizing this in a way that gives you a sense what I think of it. But I do think that some people seem to conceptualize these things in that way to think that they're this like you know the philosophy of all disciplines philosophy. They think is one that is like limited in this sort of way and you know is is obligated not to take account of empirical data. Or or if we're allowed to take account of empirical data obligated not to collect them. And and I think if you imagine each discipline is sort of surrounded by its own wall in this way. Then what you see if you think about the sort of field of human inquiry is a lot of stuff is going to fall into the gaps. There's going to be a lot of stuff that doesn't get covered and you know because the methods to answer the question or inside this wall but the question itself is inside that wall and so it's just there's no way to get it done and so it just falls into the cracks. And I think in terms of the organization of like institutional support and funding and so on that might just be a true description of reality that might be what actually happens. But I think you know as researchers as inquirers and in particular for myself as a philosopher. And you know lots of other philosophers in this area too but I don't think everyone doing this work is is a philosopher understands themselves to be a philosopher. And I don't think this is a productive way to think about things. So. So I mentioned just in passing earlier paper I did with Paulie Graham for Sunday Gardell. So I'm a psychologist and Paul and I are philosophers. And you know what we found and we're working at the same institution and chatting to each other. And what we found was that we had issues of common interest. And there were questions that the most wanted to be asking about effects of linguistic categorization on discrimination of colors. That were very very similar to questions that Paul and I wanted to ask about again the sort of categorization of these sorts of big categories. And you know Paul and I brought a bit more of the logic to the table was all brought a bit more of the experimental skill to the table. And you know we had a nice complement of skills coming together and we were able to work together to explore a question of common interest or to explore a range of questions of common interest. And I think that's a model. And you know if you were to or if anyone were to come to that paper later and say well is this philosophy or is this psychology. You know I think the best answer to that is well it's just both right if we can allow fields to overlap each other and sort of diffuse into each other. And then I think what we end up with is an overall field of inquiry that's going to be much more capable of actually addressing the range of questions that we really want to address because it's going to allow methods that work to be combined with questions that they work on. And we get a much more sort of diffuse kind of thing so I often see the sort of disciplinary boundary questions. And I run into the same sort of thing in just the non experimental logic might do as well right logic is another sort of interdisciplinary field where a number of different disciplines bump into each other and just like And I tend to think of it like well disciplinary boundary questions are there the sorts of questions that institutional structures and funding bodies and so on need to worry about because they need a way to organize who to cut the checks to. And in so far as they need to worry about it then we all have to worry about it because we're all living off the checks they're cutting us. So like it's not like we can ignore those questions of course they're but they're they're sort of just like practical dealing with institution questions and the sort of real questions. That we're actually asking as researchers the questions that we're asking as inquirers and the methods that we bring to those questions I think it's a mistake to think of those as this discipline or that discipline or the other discipline right where we're Inquirers working together to the extent that we can find common common interests and common concerns and I think that extent it is pretty great very often we can find Common interests and common concerns with people who happen to be institutionally housed in departments that you know have a different plaque on the door from our own. And I think that's just totally fine. So yeah so I want to resist the how is this philosophy question and say something like well you know why why would you ask to someone who wants to ask that like what is the purpose for which we want to categorize something as philosophy or not philosophy. You know and I say this is someone like you know I fill out grant applications right I need to put like a six digit code specifying what topic it is and so on so like okay I need to answer but how is this philosophy question for those purposes. But but I don't think that kind of respects what's actually going on intellectually. Okay so let's go to the intellectual question. So what role does philosophy play or in your case logic play in experimental philosophy logic. So does it play more of a normative role. Does it provide the principles that govern judgments and reasoning or is it more of a descriptive role of how people actually think or people actually talk. As I'm engaging in this sort of stuff it's it's just entirely the latter. I'm interested in how people actually how people's language actually works. Now there's an interesting wrinkle here though so I'm one of these folks who thinks that the way language works now now you know logic to one side right just thinking now about how does language operate. I'm one of these folks who thinks that and this is not an uncommon thing. And things that the the way language operates is intimately bound up with norms right that are are you know what a language is involves norms around language use in all kinds of ways. So when I'm bringing logic to the table to try to understand and model these phenomena. I'm trying to describe the phenomenon not prescribe how they ought to be but say how they are. But the phenomena such that I'm trying to say how they are are themselves in part norms. Right it's so I'm not merely attempting to describe you know what words in fact come out of people's heads. But rather think about okay what are the social norms that constitute a language and that guide our use of various sorts of things. That's a phenomenon that is amenable to description using this sort of logical model. So the role of logic as I understand the logic that I do. And this is not like other people should all be doing logic this way but this is just about how do I understand what I'm doing. The role of logic is purely descriptive. But the thing I'm describing is in part normative. So that's so it's a so the answer your question very definitely the second thing but you know I'm not there by denying that norms are involved it's just norms are part of the thing I'm trying to describe. Okay so what's the criteria of success in X5 larger. Is it when an experimental result validates a given logical theory. So how do you judge whether some X5 result is successful or not. I haven't thought about that question before that's a nice one. I guess my first response would be to think about you know what's the criterion of success for philosophical research in general. And it's it's. Citation. Yeah. You've got the sort of institutional constraints versus the actual intellectual pursuits. Yeah. No sure there's absolutely there's there's all kinds of like concrete material rewards that can accrue to things. For reasons more and less and less and less connected to. The actual. Yeah but no but thinking about like okay you know the the the sort of success the the success that that matters intellectually right what's the what are we trying to do when we're trying to do this. I guess not one thing. My. Yeah I mean I'm. Often in pursuit of just trying to better understand things right so maybe increase in understanding right you illuminate some phenomenon or other. So you know we think about. Again just to return to this the same old phenomenon as an example of people saying well both tall and not tall and borderline cases. Right. Are people actually contradicting themselves. When they say that right so you know you lay out a whole bunch of theories on which they absolutely are on which they're you know. A contradiction is really true in these cases and people have correctly recognized that a contradiction is true in these cases and so they're just reporting the real contradictory reality. Also you've got a range of theories that say no we actually need to be a little bit more subtle about how we interpret people's words you know they're saying. You know the person is tall in this sense but they're not tall in that sense right so we've actually two different properties in play or maybe the same property with two different extensions or. You know there's different ways where you understand the kind of thing is non contradictory and I feel like this is a sort of. You know I would like to know which of those is the case. Or if or you know maybe it's one sometimes in the other sometimes or maybe it's something totally other or you know it's it's but I would like to understand better right there's this phenomenon people say. These sequences of words to indicate borderline. But what is that phenomenon what's going on. And you know I don't expect that there will be some kind of like ironclad arm twisting. Now someone's written this 20 page paper and henceforth all humans must agree that this is the story about this. That's not how it's going to work but there will be an accumulation of evidence that will allow us to say with more and less confidence. Okay well this is starting to doesn't look like that was what was going on because we can see this phenomenon or something like that right hopefully we can narrow down and develop better. Kind of stories about about what's going on in that sort of case so it's that's probably an unsatisfying kind of awfully sort of answer but but but I suspect that's something in the area like what's you know what's the criteria of success for philosophical research in general. Well often improved understanding. So yeah maybe something like that. Okay. Okay so finally what's your advice for those who want to join our ranks as professional academic philosophers what kind of attitude should they have about doing work in philosophy. I'm again here I think this is this is another question that quite neatly runs up against this divide between institutional incentives on the one on the one side and intellectual incentives on the other. I'm looking institutionally I'm just going to punt like it's who knows you know it's it's looking it's hard to get in and the and it was hard to get in when I got in more than a decade ago and it's much much harder now. And and you know who knows what the effects of covert are going to be on the global higher education sector and so on like it's a it's a pretty it's a dire time to be offering advice about navigating institutional structures so I'm unfortunately going to be totally You're going to be totally unhelpful and just kind of punt there and so that's a really if I had useful advice I it'd be it'd be great but I'm not sure that I do. And on the other hand on the on the intellectual side I think. I don't know my my own path into philosophy has always been one of. I find a question that I'm fascinated by and then try to read what seems relevant to that question and then very and very often this has led to me. Sort of reading a bunch of kind of eclectic recent stuff and only later going back and kind of filling in the historical trajectory that led to it. And and in terms of being able to kind of get up and running relatively quickly as you you know you're asking on behalf of people who are thinking about like just coming into the discipline and so you know you start out. Not having read much and not being on top of much and I think there's a sense that sometimes people have in that space of like. Okay well I need to work from the basics forward you know and so I will start with the historical antecedents and I will move step by step until the present day and if that works for people that's great I don't have. In general do what works for you and but for for me I've found it very productive often to do the reverse and I think this is a method that sometimes doesn't get as much credit as it deserves. Of you know start with what's fascinating you right now and what people are saying about that thing right now and although what they're saying about that thing will site things that are 20 and 30 years back. Don't feel like you have to go back and read those things first right in fact often you can kind of get a rough sense of what they're saying by reading the sort of contemporary stuff. And then once you've got a sense of like okay where are we now you've got a great toolkit for asking how did we get here and then sort of going back and sort of filling in some of that and some of that background I do think. It's often important to look at these historical trajectories and to see how we got where we got. But I think sometimes people can feel pressure to start that way and I'm not sure that's the most productive place for everyone to start certainly for me I found my interest often pulled by you know what are what are my contemporary saying and then only later. Well what led to them saying that and so so doing things sort of backwards in that way can be productive for some people I think it's been productive for me so that might be a rough sort of you know don't put too much pressure on yourself to do things in order. Kind of line. And I want to just highlight earlier as well this picture about disciplines as not being walled gardens or as intellectually not being walled gardens right don't you know read what's relevant to you, not what's on the right shelf in the library. That would be the sort of advice that I would try to start folks out with but but I don't know that I have anything all that wise to say I've just stumbled through being incredibly lucky as I go and that's be lucky I guess is the. It's not very good advice I'm aware. Okay so on that note thanks again Dave for sharing your time with us and your thoughts about ex phylogic and join me again for another episode of philosophy of what matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers. Thanks so much for having me.