ABSTRACT
Descriptive relativism is the view that some phenomenon of philosophical importance varies across cultures or other demographic groups, like genders, speakers of particular languages, socio-economic groups, or age cohorts. Experimental philosophy (or “X-Phi”), as we will use these terms, studies intuitions or judgments made about philosophically interesting cases and the factors that influence those judgments. In the first four sections of this chapter we consider how experimental philosophy has contributed to debates over descriptive relativism in four areas: (i) morality, (ii) epistemology, (iii) reference, and (iv) metaphysics. In the final section, our focus is on the experimental philosophy literature that explores whether ordinary people are moral relativists or moral objectivists.
