Experimental Legal Philosophy: The Concept of Law Revisited

该研究项目旨在将实验哲学引入法哲学。首先，实验哲学是一种哲学方法论方法，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。在大多数情况下，实验哲学研究的是哲学纸上谈兵推理中的理性“直觉”，特别是在思维实验中引发的关于哲学问题的直觉。在此背景下，实验被用来探索理性直觉(所谓的正项目)的内容，并检验其认识论的可靠性(所谓的负项目)。第三，方法论上的自然主义实验哲学直接研究哲学推理中感兴趣的心理状态和过程。试验性方法尚未在一系列不同的哲学领域得到探索，但在法哲学中却普遍缺失。拟议的项目旨在纠正这一疏漏，并从实验哲学的角度探讨法哲学的中心问题，从而为法哲学提供一个新的视角。我们将从一个阶段开始，致力于对法律哲学中有希望的问题和方法进行理论化，以使其适合于试验性调查，我们将开发适当的试验性范式。然后，我们将把这些范式应用于三个连续的实验项目：第一组实验将探索应用于法律实证主义和自然法之间的经典争论的这些范式，重点是所涉及的理性“直觉”。第二组实验将利用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)来探索道德心理机制对法律认知的影响。在第三组实验中，最后将在更具体的层面上探讨这种影响，探讨关于身体伤害道德化的道德心理学结论是否可以适用于法律认知中普遍存在的非物质伤害现象(例如，在言论自由或反歧视方面)。最相关的发现将进行跨文化探索。

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.