Generalizing from the armchair

Philosophers frequently make claims about how nonphilosophers think, saying things like “it’s commonsense that,” or “most of us think that,” or “we find it intuitive that…” and so on.

Such remarks amount to empirical claims about human psychology. As a general rule, philosophers should be extremely cautious when making claims about how ordinary people think about philosophical topics.

Here, I outline a handful of reasons why they should be cautious, and discuss such caution specifically in the case of metaethics, where such pronouncements are all too common.

Reason #1: Generalizing is difficult even with data. It’s no easier without it

Given the severe methodological problems in psychology, we're probably not in a good position to make many nontrivial claims about human psychology merely from our conversations. Even dedicated empirical efforts to establish nontrivial claims face enormous challenges in terms of replicability, reproducibility, robustness, generalizability, validity, and so …