ARI Working Paper Series

In recent years we have seen a veritable explosion in philosophical and psychological studies of epistemic intuitions. Many of these analyse whether intuitions vary between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ people. In this paper I review research in experimental epistemology and connect it to other studies in cross-cultural epistemology. I suggest that debates in the former have given us new reasons to explore the relationship between empirical research and epistemology, whilst the empirical methods employed by the latter provide finer-grained tools with which we may study cultural differences, should they exist. I show how some current practices in experimental epistemology suffer from two shortcomings: a dichotomous, monolithic approach to cultural groups and a restrictive view of empirical methods. In the light of repeated failures to replicate key studies in experimental epistemology, an empirically-informed epistemology will benefit from an expanded concept of epistemic cultures and a widened scope of investigation and methods.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published in The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology (first edition), Miranda Fricker, Peter J. Graham, David Henderson, Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen (eds.), Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2019.