A Plea for Minimally Biased Empirical Philosophy

Naturalistic philosophers rely on literature search and review in a number of ways and for different purposes. Yet this article shows how processes of literature search and review are likely to be affected by widespread and systematic biases. A solution to this problem is offered here. Whilst the tradition of systematic reviews of literature from scientific disciplines has been neglected in philosophy, systematic reviews are important tools that minimize bias in literature search and review and allow for greater reproducibility and transparency. If naturalistic philosophers wish to reduce bias in their research, they should then supplement their traditional tools for literature search and review by including systematic methodologies. 1.Introduction Naturalism has been a hugely successful research program in contemporary analytic philosophy. Naturalistic philosophers have been following Quine (1952) in challenging the separation of philosophical from scientific research and arguing that philosophy and science are best conceived of as engaged in essentially the same enterprise, pursuing similar goals and deploying similar methods. Yet, naturalism comes in different forms, and a distinction is often made between experimental and empirical philosophy (Prinz 2008; Rose and Danks 2013). Experimental philosophers have recently adopted methodologies from the behavioural, social and cognitive sciences and engaged in a number of empirical projects to answer philosophically interesting questions (Knobe and Nichols 2008; Alexander 2012; Sytsma and Buckwalter 2016). Empirical philosophers use instead empirical results acquired by professional scientists in their philosophical theorizing. Notably, empirical philosophy has become extremely popular in several corners of philosophical research (Knobe 2015). Whilst some argue that empirical philosophers should turn themselves into experimental philosophers (Machery and O’Neil 2014), others have expressed a number of qualms about the project of experimental philosophy (Polonioli 2016; Seyedsayamdost 2015;