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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.

Experimental philosophy's much-discussed 'restrictionist' program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as 'arguments from hallucination'). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's 'sources project' seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception ('argument from illusion'), trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]