Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’ seeks to developpsychological explanations of philosophically relevantintuitions which help us assess their evidentiary value. Thispaper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitionsprompted by brief philosophical case-descriptions. For proofof concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradoxabout perception (‘argument from hallucination’). We tracethem to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executedin verb comprehension. We employ a forced-choiceplausibility-ranking task to show that contextuallyinappropriate stereotypical inferences are made from lesssalient uses of the verb “to see”. This yields a debunkingexplanation which resolves the philosophical paradox.