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forbid—bean-bag or deck chair (although, as it happens, Wittgenstein inflicted deck chairs on his students who came to his spartan Cambridge room). No, the philosopher sits in an armchair: it’s no doubt comfortably deep, and a little frayed at the edges, and there’s room on the armrest to balance a book and a smudgy glass of sherry.
    It’s this image that explains the icon of a new movement. This movement has a label that could have been dreamed up by a public relations firm—x-phi—standing for “experimental philosophy,” philosophy with an empirical edge. In recent years, blogs, periodicals, and books have been devoted to x-phi,and research grants have been lavishly bestowed on its exponents. The icon of the x-phi movement is a burning armchair.
    Critics complain that the experiments carried out under the x-phi banner lack scientific rigor and should not be categorized as philosophy. “The worry about experimental philosophy is that it’s like Christian Science—it isn’t either,” is how one detractor puts it. 1 We’ll return to such worries later. Nonetheless, insofar as a philosophical movement can be fashionable, x-phi is currently very much all the rage.
    At least since the work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the German logician, Gottlob Frege, the portrayal of the armchair philosopher has had some basis in reality. Frege regarded philosophy as a discipline requiring just the tools of logic and conceptual analysis. In that sense, it could be practiced without rising from the upholstery and it was unlike chemistry, which had Bunsen burners, history, which fed on archives, or sociology, which drew on surveys.
    Philosophy was not always like this. Philosophy has become a separate discipline only relatively recently, and philosophers have historically made use of findings from the empirical sciences. Some philosophers even performed their own experiments—Aristotle, a pioneer in taxonomy, dissected all manner of creatures, from crustaceans to cuttlefish. 2 The x-phi movement claims to be a return to an earlier time, when philosophy had a broader self-conception, and was not separated from other disciplines. As one of the leaders of the x-phi movement expresses it, experimental philosophy is “more a retro movement, an attempt to go back to what philosophy was traditionally about.” 3
    While x-phi has drawn extensively on the work of social psychology, until recently much of it has involved a different methodology—a deconstruction of everyday intuitions throughsurveys. Faced with a real or imaginary set of circumstances, philosophers are not shy to proclaim that their reaction must be the universal reaction of all right-minded people everywhere. “We can all agree that …,” they might say. A typical example is given by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Imagine five people are at risk in a hospital, not from their ailments but from the ceiling of their room, which is about to fall on them. We can prevent this potential calamity by pumping on a ceiling-support mechanism, but doing so will inevitably release lethal fumes into the room of a sixth person. Here, she writes, “ it is plain we may not proceed.” 4 But x-phi has begun to undermine that sort of assured presumption. Is it really the case that the intuitions in the Oxford colleges of Somerville and St. Anne’s are shared by the inhabitants of Nashville and Saint Petersburg?
    There are many areas of philosophy where the cross-cultural sociology of intuitions is injecting new energy into age-old questions, and not merely in ethics. Take the relationship between knowledge and belief: when can I be said to know something, when to merely believe it. Once, the standard answer was that I know it when I have justified true belief, and I have a justified true belief when the following three conditions are satisfied: (a) I believe it, (b) it is true, and (c) I have good reason for believing it to be true. Here’s an example. Do I know