[DOCUMENTARY] I hope psychiatric treatment in the US has improved since the 80s

Experimental Philosophers should be dismissive of armchair methods

It is interesting to see how experimental philosophers does not want to distance themselves fundamentally from the traditional ways of doing things in philosophy. Some feel the necessity to point out that not all experimental philosophy is negative, that there are some positive projects going on. And yes, that is very probably the case, but would it have mattered? Why not just come out of the closet and say it - conceptual analysis is a junk practice.

   To stay lenient on the tradtition has advantages. It retains the possibility of inheriting the institutional benefits that are being enjoyed by analytical philosophers today, with chairs already being created specifically for experimental philosophers. When we have so many criticisms that hits right at the core of analytical philosophy, to do some name dropping, Rorty, Derrida, later Wittgenstein, why not join this crowd rather than try to appease the group of people that your work is (implicitly or explicitly) aimed against? Family resemblance and nominalism is much closer to x-phi than essentialism is. 

    No, instead we are stuck with traditional philosophers assuming that they are safe when adopting some naive form of the expertise argument, and can comfortably wave off the developments in x-phi. The (to my mind pathetic) discussion of who has the burden of proof to show that philosopher are/aren´t experts: lets be honest, even if it was conclusivly shown that the burden of proof is on the armchair philosopher, there is no chance he or she would go out and do the actual experiments. That is tantamount to the concession that their own methods are inferior, at least in that respect.

     I think x-phiers should read more of Richard Rorty, and try to align themselves with his metaphilosophy. The historicism and sociology that Rorty advocated seems to fit nicely together with the methods of x-phiers, and the lack of grandiouse claims of having found the essense of something goes even better with a Rortian outlook. The demarcation of groups, such as "cultural, socioeconomical, gender", is also in line with what Rorty thought was the case: we justify our claims to a group of people that are sufficiently like us in the relevant respect. Thus, when we are warranted to assert that we know something in one cultural or socioeconomical context may differ from when we are warranted to assert it in another, without giving up on concistency. 

     Again, I am tempted to give a sociological explanation of why x-phiers are trying to not upset the beast that is the analytical tradition. For careerist, instituitional, and social reasons. Yet I am never completly happy with ascribing people motives and intentions that they are not explicitly committed to. I perfer people who have the guts to burn some bridges for their convictions, rather than try keeping as many patched up bridges as possible up at the same time. We need to turn the tables on Williamson, who claims that the metaphysical realist work of Kripke and others have made dismissing essentialism  anachronistc (absurd to many, I know), but that he got away with this claim should bother us.