ABSTRACT
In the course of philosophical debates, philosophers routinely appeal to intuitions about cases as a way of supporting their positions and challenging those of their opponents. Experimental philosophy is a relatively new field that uses the methods of psychology to study and scrutinize these intuitive judgments, with the ultimate goal of making progress in these philosophical debates. This chapter distinguishes between two important experimental philosophy projects, the sociological project and the psychological project, that are particularly relevant for moral theory. The sociological project looks at the distribution of intuitions and commonsense judgments within and across societies. The psychological project in experimental philosophy, in contrast, investigates psychological structure. A critic of the psychological program in experimental philosophy might argue that empirical research is unnecessary; it is possible to uncover the contents of the underlying information structures that are the basis for intuitive judgments from the armchair alone.
