Empirical Questions

It is very common for philosophers to distinguish the kinds of issues that primarily concern them from others that they label “empirical questions.” For example, the nature of emotion would be a philosophical question, but whether women are more emotional than men would be an empirical question. Philosophers do claim that empirical questions require philosophical input. Thus, how could one test whether women were more emotional than men without a clear understanding of what emotion is? Given different conceptions of emotion, one could get different answers to the empirical question. 

The very hypothesis that women are more emotional probably presumes that being weepy eyed is a feminine trait; but doesn’t this ignore the obvious emotionality of men being angry? It seems to me that one would hardly even pose the question of women’s greater emotionality, not to mention offer an answer, if one had a proper conception of emotion in mind as encompassing not just relatively passive acts like crying but also more assertive acts like clenching your fists. The very synonym “passion” may suggest a conception of emotion biased to the former (although, given the infinite variety or richness or subtleties of even a single language like English, “passion” can also be used to refer to intense feeling). Meanwhile, it would be an empirical question whether women are, as we say “in fact,” more weepy eyed. And so on and so forth. 

What I want to suggest now is that there is every reason to expect empirical questions to be just as insoluble or contestable (or, to put it nicely, “perennial”) as philosophical questions are notorious for being. One reason is precisely the inextricable, complex, and varied pas de deux just adumbrated between concepts or meanings, the traditional bailiwick of philosophy, and facts, the traditional bailiwick of science. Given the undecidability of conceptual questions, such as “What is emotion?” or “What is happiness?” or “What is humane?” or “What is existence?” or even “What is a unicorn?” (is a rhinoceros a unicorn?) etc. ad inf., the equal undecidability of empirical questions that employ those concepts, such as “Are women more emotional than men?” or  “Do other animals have emotions?” or “Are most human beings happy?” or “Is animal experimentation humane?” or “Do unicorns exist?” etc. ad inf., is a foregone conclusion. And since in the final analysis all empirical questions employ concepts that could conceivably be debated, it is a real question (of which sort?) whether any empirical question could ever be answered definitively.

 A second reason is that the pas de deuxis even more complex that already suggested: In fact our dancers are whirling around in a circle. For conceptual questions, the presumed bailiwick of philosophy, are themselves empirical questions. (I thank Thomas Pölzler for reminding me of this. He is the author of the most valiant attempt I know of to salvage empirical inquiry.) After all, how is one supposed to determine what an emotion, or a unicorn, or “the good” is? Sure, one could check one’s own linguistic intuitions. And that is typically what philosophers have done. But the new discipline of experimental philosophy has alerted us to the possibility and indeed likelihood that different people – even different thoughtful and knowledgeable people -- have different linguistic intuitions. In fact, one and the same person can become very aware of the ambiguity of just about any term, as noted above. Furthermore, meanings are commonly derived from or altered on the basis of empirical investigations or revelations; thus, “water” has come to mean H₂O. 

What I consider to be the vain attempt of most analytic philosophers is to discover the meaning of a given term … whereas to me now it seems that there is hardly ever any such thing. What there will be are different sets of people having different conceptions of a given x, and so the various empirical truths about x will vary from one set of people to another … or, as noted, even for a single individual, depending on which conception suits the use of the term for his or her present purposes. Thus, I would expect the answers to empirical questions to be determinable only if one held out the unrealistic prospect of univocal analyses of their component terms. 

The more realistic approach to empirical questions is, I submit, to expect that they will have different answers for different groups of people or under different conditions, depending on which conception is operative. Another way to put this is that the answer to any empirical question, as for any philosophical question, is “Yes and no,” that is, “Yes, given Conception A of phenomenon x” and “No, given Conception B of phenomenon x,” and of course “under such-and-such conditions.” Then it may turn out, for example, that women are more emotional than men, given Conception A of emotion (at least under such-and-such conditions), but not according to Conception B of emotion (under those conditions). 

The practical takeaway for empirical investigators is to make damn sure that you know exactly which conception you are investigating and also that your investigative subjects (if they are people) are on the same page. In other words, the best empirical questions are the narrowest ones … well, at least under certain conditions (such as hoping to arrive at a definitive answer) and, of course, given a particular conception of “empirical question” 😊