Introduction

The chapters collected in this third volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy illustrate the ways in which the field continues to broaden, taking on new methodological approaches and interacting with substantive theories from an ever wider array of disciplines. As the chapters themselves clearly show, some recent research in experimental philosophy is going more deeply into well-established questions in the field, but at the same time, other strands of research are exploring issues that hardly appeared at all in the field even a few years ago. Thus, we see the introduction of new empirical and statistical methods (network analysis), new theoretical approaches (formal semantics), and the development of entirely new interdisciplinary connections (most notably, in the emerging field of “experimental jurisprudence”). New Questions, New Methods Illustrating experimental jurisprudence is a contribution by Raff Donelson and Ivar Hannikainen. Philosophers of law have long been concerned with the question as to whether it is built into the very concept of law itself that it meet certain normative requirements. Would something even count as a law at all if it was secret, or unintelligible, or not entirely prospective? Donelson and Hannikainen investigate people’s intuitions on these questions, and obtain a surprising result. People are actually more inclined to say that it is necessarily the case that laws fulfill these normative requirements than that it is actually the case that laws fulfill these normative requirements. This finding sets up an intriguing puzzle for future work in experimental jurisprudence.