We are conducting a research study to examine academic philosophers' intuitions.
This study is carried out within the framework of a research project in the Departments of Philosophy at Yale University and the University of Granada. Our goal is to understand the factors that shape philosophers' intuitions about classic thought experiments.
The study consists of a survey that will take approximately 5 minutes to complete. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee for Human Research at the University of Granada, with protocol number 5766/CEIH/2026.
If you are interested in participating, please click the button below. Thank you for your time and contribution to our research!
Research on philosophical thought experiments consistently finds that people disagree about the correct answer—some say it's A, others say it's B. One explanation is that individual people actually hold conflicting intuitions: Many people who ultimately choose B may still feel pulled toward A, and vice versa.
In recent work, we tested this hypothesis, asking whether laypeople have conflicting intuitions about a series of fifteen different thought experiments drawn from the philosophical literature. (You can check out the preprint here).
Our next step is to understand whether philosophers' responses show the same patterns or differ as a result of philosophical training.
Conflicting intuitions among philosophers: Preliminary results
The figure below displays the preliminary results with philosophers. Each thought experiment is represented by a pair of circles, one for each answer. The x-axis shows the percentage of philosophers who gave that answer, and the y-axis shows the percentage of those philosophers who reported feeling conflicted.
Click on a legend entry to highlight a thought experiment and hover over the circles to see more information about each answer.
We still need more philosophers to participate to reach our target sample size.
Please consider sharing this study with other philosophers. We greatly appreciate it.