The Fourfold Route to Empirical Enlightenment: Experimental Philosophy’s Adolescence and the Changing Body of Work

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself.