Philosophically-informed empirical science

I think I speak for several authors on this blog when I express my keen interest in empirically-informed philosophy (see e.g., here), but I am also intrigued by the closely related philosophically-informed empirical science. This type of empirical science takes inspiration from philosophy to come up with empirical designs, and often makes evaluative claims regarding specific philosophical theses based on empirical findings.There is a substantial body of empirical research in cognitive psychology that is specifically aimed at investigating claims in traditional philosophy of mind, metaphysics and other fields, for example, Hume's theory of perception (in neo-empiricist research like that by Barsalou), or the evaluation of various notions of innateness. 

A recent paper by Véronique Izard, Pierre Pica, Liz Spelke and Stanislas Dehaene is a nice illustration of this (the paper can be downloaded here). It is entitled "Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group" and has appeared in the most recent issue of PNAS. [I've been keeping track of this research group's work for some years, and in 2008 I collaborated with Pierre Pica and Véronique Izard on a special issue on the relationship between language and numerical cognition in Philosophical Psychology]

This recent paper investigates whether or not the Mundurucu, members from a small-scale South American culture, have geometrical intuitions that are in line with Euclidean geometry. A quote from the abstract:  "Kant argued that Euclidean geometry is synthesized on the basis of an a priori intuition of space. This proposal inspired much behavioral research probing whether spatial navigation in humans and animals conforms to the predictions of Euclidean geometry." From their introduction: "Although Kant’s argument for the existence of an a priori intuition of space is philosophical in nature, it implies that the human mind is spontaneously endowed with Euclidean intuitions, an empirically testable proposal that belongs to cognitive science." And further on in their discussion "In line with our previous research on intuitive arithmetic and geometry in the Mundurucu and with Plato’s views on education as developed in the Meno, the present results indicate that sophisticated protomathematical intuitions for both arithmetic and geometry can be revealed in all humans provided that the relevant abstract concepts are exemplified by concrete situations."

In their study, Mundurucu and US participants were presented with questions concerning lines, planes, and points. To help them, they were given real planar or spherical objects (a table and a half calabash respectively). Two examples of questions: "Can a [straight] line be drawn through 3 unaligned points?", "do these (non-paralel) lines cross each other at the small-angle side?". The authors conclude that both Mundurucu and American participants have intuitions that are closely in line with Euclidean geometry. This was somewhat surprising, given that Mundurucu and Americans have very different geometrical experiences: Mundurucu have much more challenging navigational tasks (e.g., in foraging) compared to Americans, but they do not have any formal geometrical instruction.

The study seems to me an interesting instance of what Eric has termed "Newton's challenge to philosophy". Although Véronique Izard and colleagues are not philosophers, they clearly make use of empirical philosophy to help settle debates within philosophy (in this case, is knowledge of geometry innate?). 

A few unsystematic observations about philosophically-informed empirical science:

1. They tend to take inspiration from well-known early modern or classical philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, Plato, Aristotle...There are relatively few empirically-informed cognitive scientists who explore recent philosophical notions. When this happens, the author (or one of the authors) is a philosopher. For example, Igor Douven and Sarah Verbrugge's The Adams family (forthcoming in Cognition) takes as a starting point several notions of conditional probability from (fairly recent) formal philosophy. 
2. They use philosophical claims as a starting point, but do not elaborate much on the philosophical literature (again, work by philosophers is an exception)
3. They sometimes make sweeping claims about the truth-value of philosophical statements based on empirical research.