On Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions: Failure to Detect Differences between Ethnic Groups
17 Pages Posted: 30 Oct 2012 Last revised: 24 Mar 2014
Date Written: October 29, 2012
Abstract
In one of the earlier influential papers in the field of Experimental Philosophy, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) reported that respondents answered Gettier type questions differently depending on their ethnic backgrounds. The authors found that participants from East and South Asian backgrounds had different intuitions on these kinds of scenarios than those classified as Westerners. There is currently a debate going on, on the significance of the results of Weinberg et al. (2001) and its implications for philosophical methodology in general and epistemology in specific. Despite the debates, however, to our knowledge, there has not been a replication attempt of the experiments of the original paper. We collected data from four different sources (two on-line and two in-person) to replicate the experiments. Our main focus was on differences between the ethnic groups reported in the original paper. Despite several different data sets and in various cases larger sample sizes, we failed to detect significant differences between the above-mentioned ethnic groups.
Keywords: epistemic intuitions, experimental, epistemology, experimental philosophy, intuitions
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