Experimental Legal Philosophy: The Concept of Law Revisited

该研究项目旨在将实验哲学引入法律的哲学。实验哲学首先是哲学的一种方法论途径，运用心理学和认知科学中发展起来的实验方法来研究哲学问题和理论。大多数情况下，实验哲学研究哲学扶手椅推理中的理性“直觉”，特别是在思想实验中引发的哲学问题的直觉。在这种背景下，实验被用来探索理性的“直觉”（所谓的“积极项目”）的内容，以及测试其认识论的可靠性（所谓的“消极项目”）。第三，实验哲学的方法论自然主义分支直接研究哲学推理中感兴趣的心理状态和过程。实验方法已经在一系列不同的哲学领域进行了探索，但在法律的哲学中却普遍缺乏。该项目的目的是弥补这一遗漏，并提供一个新的视角，从实验哲学的角度探讨它的核心问题。我们将开始一个阶段，致力于理论化关于有前途的问题和方法，在法律的哲学方面，他们的顺从性，以实验研究，我们将发展适当的实验范式。然后，我们将这些范式应用于三个连续的实验项目：第一组实验将探讨这些范式适用于法律的实证主义和自然法之间的经典之争，强调理性的“直觉”参与。第二组实验将探讨道德心理机制对法律的认知的影响，借鉴道德心理学的两个核心范式（道德基础理论和道德二元理论）。这种影响最终将在第三组实验中在更具体的层面上进行探索，解决关于身体伤害道德化的道德心理学发现是否可以应用于法律的认知中广泛存在的非物质伤害现象（例如，关于表达自由或反歧视）。将对最相关的调查结果进行跨文化探讨。

The research project aims to introduce experimental philosophy into legal philosophy. Experimental philosophy is, first of all, a methodological approach in philosophy, employing experimental methods developed in the psychological and cognitive sciences for the investigation of philosophical questions and theories. Mostly, experimental philosophy studies rational ‘intuitions’ that feature in philosophical armchair reasoning, in particular, intuitions on philosophical issues elicited in thought experiments. In this context, experiments are employed to explore the content of rational ‘intuitions’ (so-called ‘positive project’) as well as to test their epistemological reliability (so-called ‘negative project’). A third, methodologically naturalist strand of experimental philosophy directly studies mental states and processes of interest in philosophical reasoning. The experimental approach has yet been explored in a range of diverse philosophical areas but is widely absent in legal philosophy. The proposed project aims to remedy this omission and to provide a new perspective on the philosophy of law by exploring central issues of it from an experimental philosophy perspective. We will begin with a stage dedicated to theorizing about promising issues and approaches in legal philosophy with regard to their amenability to experimental investigations, and we will develop adequate experimental paradigms. We will then apply these paradigms to three successive experimental projects: The first set of experiments will explore these paradigms as applied to the classic dispute between legal positivism and natural law, with an emphasis on the rational ‘intuitions’ involved. The second set of experiments will then probe the impact of moral-psychological mechanisms on legal cognition, drawing on two central paradigms in moral psychology (moral foundations theory and moral dyad theory). Such influences will finally be explored on a more concrete level in the third set of experiments, addressing whether moral psychological findings about the moralization of physical harm can be applied to the phenomenon of immaterial harm widespread in legal cognition (e.g., with regard to freedom of expression or antidiscrimination). The most relevant findings will be explored cross-culturally.