Exploring the philosophical mind: An empirical investigation of the process of philosophizing using the protocol analysis methodology

Abstract

Many empirically supported versions of stage and componential models of the cognitive processing underlying the completion of various tasks spanning a wide range of domains have been developed by cognitive scientists of various kinds. These include models of scientific (e.g. Dunbar 1999), mathematical (e.g. Schoenfeld 1985), artistic (e.g. Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976), engineering (e.g. Purzer et al 2018), legal (e.g. Ronkainen 2011), medical (e.g. Vimla et al 2012) and even culinary cognition (e.g. Stierand and Dörfler 2015) (and this list is nowhere near exhaustive). Yet, despite the existence of fields such as experimental and metaphilosophy which take philosophy as their object, often by using methods from the cognitive sciences, a stage or componential model of philosophizing is conspicuously missing from even an exhaustive list of the kind just produced.