Comparative judgement for experimental philosophy: A method for assessing ordinary meaning in vehicles in the park cases

ABSTRACT

This paper demonstrates the value to experimental philosophy of an empirical method from the social sciences – that of comparative judgment. Comparative judgment is a method of assigning scores to (perceptions of) objects using paired comparisons. We use this method to explore the “ordinary meaning” of words, and the classic case of vehicles in the park in particular. We present an empirical study comprising three conditions. Given a pair of potential vehicles, participants were asked to judge either 1) the better example of a vehicle, 2) the worse violation of a sign that reads “no vehicles in the park”, or 3) the bigger nuisance in a park. We find that both the meaning of the wording of the rule and the intention behind it influence participants judgments of rule-violations, consistent with previous studies. More importantly, comparative judgment provides more fine-grained information about agreement and the weighted rankings of the potential vehicles than other methods, with widespread potential applications in experimental philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Vehicles in the park
• comparative judgement
• experimental philosophy
• ordinary meaning
• experimental jurisprudence
• Methodology

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Glenn Anderau, Ethan Landes, Justin Sytsma, and our anonymous referees for feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Experimental jurisprudence involves the use of experimental methods to investigate theoretical questions about legal concepts, and the law and its applications (see Sommers, 2021; Tobia, 2022).

2. Chartrand (2022) provides a good, up-to-date overview of corpus methods in experimental philosophy.

3. Further details of the debate between Hart and Fuller are given by Schauer (2008).

4. One thing to note is that this setup tests individual terms as examples of vehicles, but one possible textualist approach is to use sentence meaning rather than word meaning. One could argue, for example, that “vehicle” is used differently in the context of a sentence expressing a rule. The question then is whether this is due to sentence meaning or because the sentence provides insight into the intention of the rule. The results in Tobia’s (2020) appendix (comparing experiments 1A and 1B) suggest the latter. Nonetheless, a textualist of this kind could object that our Vehicles condition only tracks word meaning and not sentence meaning, but they may nonetheless be interested in the contrast between the Violation and Nuisance conditions.

5. Currently this is accepted to be a source of participants who will give high quality data (see Cova, 2023).

6. The source code is openly available at https://github.com/georgekinnear/shiny-vehicles-in-the-park

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) Project G083620N: “The Epistemology of Data Science: Mathematics and the Critical Research Agenda on Data Practices”. Our thanks to Karen Francois and Patrick Allo for their support.