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  1. Models of Philosophical Thought Experimentation.Jonathan Andy Tapsell - 2014 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    The practice of thought experimentation plays a central role in contemporary philosophical methodology. Many philosophers rely on thought experimentation as their primary and even sole procedure for testing theories about the natures of properties and relations. This test procedure involves entertaining hypothetical cases in imaginative thought and then undergoing intuitions about the distribution of properties and relations in them. A theory’s comporting with an intuition is treated as evidence in favour of it; but a clash is treated as evidence against (...)
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  • Thought Experiments & Literary Learning.McComb Geordie - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto, St. George Campus
    In my dissertation, I develop a novel approach to thought experiments and literary learning. It’s novel primarily because, unlike many prominent approaches, it has us refrain from advancing theories, from giving logical analyses, and from explicating. We are, instead, to proceed in a way inspired by Wittgenstein’s writings. We are, that is, to clarify words that give rise to problems and to clear those problems away. To clarify words, we may compare language games in which figure terms like “thought experiment.” (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ciência, Imaginação e Valores na Virada Energética Alemã: um exemplo da metodologia de Neurath para a tecnologia social.Ivan Ferreira da Cunha & Alexander Linsbichler - 2024 - Revista Kriterion 65 (156):673-700.
    O utopianismo científico de Neurath é a proposta para que as ciências sociais se envolvam na elaboração, desenvolvimento e comparação de cenários contrafactuais, as ‘utopias’. Tais cenários podem ser entendidos como peças centrais de experimentos de pensamento científicos, isto é, em exercícios da imaginação que não apenas promovem a revisão conceitual, mas também estimulam a criatividade para lidar com problemas vivenciados, já que utopias são esforços para imaginar como o futuro poderia ser. Ademais, experimentos de pensamento utópicos podem oferecer conhecimento (...)
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  • Science, Imagination and Values in the German Energy Turn: an Example of Neurath's Methodology for Social Technology.Ivan Ferreira da Cunha & Alexander Linsbichler - manuscript - Translated by Ivan Ferreira da Cunha & Alexander Linsbichler.
    Neurath’s scientific utopianism is the proposal that the social sciences should engage in the elaboration, development, and comparison of counterfactual scenarios, the ‘utopias’. Such scenarios can be understood as centerpieces of scientific thought experiments, that is, in exercises of imagination that not only promote conceptual revision, but also stimulate creativity to deal with experienced problems, as utopias are efforts to imagine what the future could look like. Moreover, utopian thought experiments can offer scientific knowledge to inform political debates and decisions, (...)
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  • Naturalized metaphysics or displacing metaphysicians to save metaphysics.Rasmus Jaksland - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-25.
    Naturalized metaphysics aims to establish justified metaphysical claims, where metaphysics is meant to carry its usual significance, while avoiding the traditional methods of metaphysics—a priori reasoning, conceptual analysis, intuitions, and common sense—which naturalized metaphysics argues are not epistemically probative. After offering an explication of what it means to do metaphysics, this paper argues that naturalized metaphysics, at the outset, is hospitable to doing metaphysics. The underdetermination of metaphysics by science, however, changes the picture. Naturalized metaphysics has to break this underdetermination, (...)
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  • Otto Neurath's Scientific Utopianism Revisited - A Refined Model for Utopias in Thought Experiments.Alexander Linsbichler & Ivan Ferreira da Cunha - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie (2):1-26.
    Otto Neurath’s empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to politi- cal economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath’s utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist’s model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist’s model more adequately complies with many (...)
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  • Thought Experiments and the Scientific Imagination.Alice Murphy - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    Thought experiments (TEs) are important tools in science, used to both undermine and support theories, and communicate and explain complex phenomena. Their interest within philosophy of science has been dominated by a narrow question: How do TEs increase knowledge? My aim is to push beyond this to consider their broader value in scientific practice. I do this through an investigation into the scientific imagination. Part one explores questions regarding TEs as “experiments in the imagination” via a debate concerning the epistemic (...)
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  • Poznawczy status eksperymentów myślowych. Platonizm, empiryzm, modele mentalne i analogia.Przemysław Zawadzki - 2017 - Filozofia Nauki 98 (2):121-135.
    The paper begins with a characterization of thought experiments, followed by a general outline of contemporary debates in the field. The discussion reveals that the most significant controversy involved is the dispute over the epistemic status of thought experiments between empiricists, Platonists, and the proponents of mental models. After a critical analysis of these approaches, a new theoretical framework proposed by Paul Bartha is introduced. It is suggested that Bartha’s approach, which appeals to a theory of analogy, offers new insights (...)
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  • Getting Gettier straight: thought experiments, deviant realizations and default interpretations.Pierre Saint-Germier - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1783-1806.
    It has been pointed out that Gettier case scenarios have deviant realizations and that deviant realizations raise a difficulty for the logical analysis of thought experiments. Grundmann and Horvath have shown that it is possible to rule out deviant realizations by suitably modifying the scenario of a Gettier-style thought experiment. They hypothesize further that the enriched scenario corresponds to the way expert epistemologists implicitly interpret the original one. However, no precise account of this implicit enrichment is offered, which makes the (...)
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  • Thought Experiments: State of the Art.Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown - 2017 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 1-28.
    This is the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments.
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  • Lucky Math: Anti-luck Epistemology and Necessary Truth.Danilo Suster - 2017 - In Bojan Borstner Smiljana Gartner (ed.), Thought Experiments between Nature and Society. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 119-133.
    How to accommodate the possibility of lucky true beliefs in necessary (or armchair) truths within contemporary modal epistemology? According to safety accounts luck consists in the modal proximity of a false belief, but a belief in a true mathematical proposition could not easily be false because a proposition believed could never be false. According to Miščević modal stability of a true belief under small changes in the world is not enough, stability under small changes in the cognizer should also (and (...)
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  • The Artistic Turn.Tine Wilde - 2012 - Dutch Internet Journal BLIND! 29 (Macht).
    We are living in an increasingly complex world. How are we able to cope with this complexity and the difficulties that arise from it? Can philosophy and art, classified as the two utmost useless and pointless disciplines, have any (positive) influence on the urgent and pressing problems at hand? And, related to this, if the two have more than just their uselessness in common, how, then, are philosophy and art related? In this article, I will argue that although ‘useless’ disciplines (...)
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  • Thought experiments in ethics.Georg Brun - 2017 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 195–210.
    This chapter suggests a scheme of reconstruction, which explains how scenarios, questions and arguments figure in thought experiments. It then develops a typology of ethical thought experiments according to their function, which can be epistemic, illustrative, rhetorical, heuristic or theory-internal. Epistemic functions of supporting or refuting ethical claims rely on metaethical assumptions, for example, an epistemological background of reflective equilibrium. In this context, thought experiments may involve intuitive as well as explicitly argued judgements; they can be used to generate moral (...)
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  • Mahdollisuus, välttämättömyys ja luodut ikuiset totuudet Descartesin filosofiassa.Forsman Jan - 2016 - In Ilkka Niiniluoto, Tuomas Tahko & Teemu Toppinen (eds.), Mahdollisuus. Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland. pp. 120-129.
    Tässä artikkelissa käsittelen Descartesin ikuisten totuuksien välttämättömyyteen liittyvää ongelmaa. Teoksessa Mietiskelyjä ensimmäisestä filosofiasta (1641–1642) Descartes nostaa esiin käsitteen ikuisista totuuksista, käyttäen esimerkkinään kolmiota. Kolmion muuttumattomaan ja ikuiseen luontoon kuuluu esimerkiksi, että sen kolme kulmaa ovat yhteenlaskettuna 180°. Se on totta kolmiosta, vaikka yhtään yksittäistä kolmiota ei olisi koskaan ollutkaan olemassa. Eräät ajattelemieni asioiden piirteet ovat siis Descartesin mukaan ajattelustani riippumattomia. Ikuisia totuuksia ovat ainakin matemaattiset ja geometriset tosiseikat sekä ristiriidan laki. Samoin Descartesin kuuluisa lause “ajattelen, siis olen” lukeutuu ikuisten totuuksien (...)
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  • Imagination and insight: a new acount of the content of thought experiments.Letitia Meynell - 2014 - Synthese 191 (17):4149-4168.
    This paper motivates, explains, and defends a new account of the content of thought experiments. I begin by briefly surveying and critiquing three influential accounts of thought experiments: James Robert Brown’s Platonist account, John Norton’s deflationist account that treats them as picturesque arguments, and a cluster of views that I group together as mental model accounts. I use this analysis to motivate a set of six desiderata for a new approach. I propose that we treat thought experiments primarily as aesthetic (...)
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  • Putting the ‘Experiment’ back into the ‘Thought Experiment’.Lorenzo Sartori - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-36.
    Philosophers have debated at length the epistemological status of scientific thought experiments. I contend that the literature on this topic still lacks a common conceptual framework, a lacuna that produces radical disagreement among the participants in this debate. To remedy this problem, I suggest focusing on the distinction between the internal and the external validity of an experiment, which is also crucial for thought experiments. I then develop an account of both kinds of validity in the context of thought experiments. (...)
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  • Philosophical Expertise Put to the Test.Samuel Schindler & Pierre Saint-Germier - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):592-608.
    The so-called expertise defence against sceptical challenges from experimental philosophy has recently come under attack: there are several studies claiming to have found direct evidence that philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments are susceptible to erroneous effects. In this paper, we distinguish between the customary ‘immune experts’ version of the expertise defence and an ‘informed experts’ version. On the informed expertise defence, we argue, philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments could be preferable to those by the folk even if it were true (...)
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  • Probing theoretical statements with thought experiments.Rawad El Skaf - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6119-6147.
    Many thought experiments are used to probe theoretical statements. One crucial strategy for doing this, or so I will argue, is the following. A TE reveals an inconsistency in part of our previously held, sometimes empirically well-established, theoretical statements. A TEer or her critic then proposes a resolution in the form of a conjecture, a hypothesis that merits further investigation. To explore this characterisation of the epistemic function of such TEs, I clarify the nature of the inconsistencies revealed by TEs, (...)
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  • The material theory of induction and the epistemology of thought experiments.Michael T. Stuart - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 83 (C):17-27.
    John D. Norton is responsible for a number of influential views in contemporary philosophy of science. This paper will discuss two of them. The material theory of induction claims that inductive arguments are ultimately justified by their material features, not their formal features. Thus, while a deductive argument can be valid irrespective of the content of the propositions that make up the argument, an inductive argument about, say, apples, will be justified (or not) depending on facts about apples. The argument (...)
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  • Die Aussagekraft wirklichkeitsferner Gedankenexperimente für Theorien personaler Identität.Marc Andree Weber - 2017 - In Andreas Oberprantacher & Anne Siegetsleitner (eds.), Mensch sein – Fundament, Imperativ oder Floskel Beiträge zum 10. Kongress der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Philosophie. pp. 493-503.
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  • (1 other version)How Thought Experiments Increase Understanding.Michael T. Stuart - 2017 - In Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments. London: Routledge. pp. 526-544.
    We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear on explicating the different ways (...)
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  • How to Reconstruct a Thought Experiment.Marek Picha - 2011 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 18 (2):154-188.
    The paper is a contribution to the debate on the epistemological status of thought experiments. I deal with the epistemological uniqueness of experiments in the sense of their irreducibility to other sources of justification. In particular, I criticize an influential argument for the irreducibility of thought experiments to general arguments. First, I introduce the radical empiricist theory of eliminativism, which considers thought experiments to be rhetorically modified arguments, uninteresting from the epistemological point of view. Second, I present objections to the (...)
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  • Otto Neurath and Ludwig von Mises. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in Viennese Late Enlightenment.Alexander Linsbichler - 2021 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 14 (2).
    Logical empiricism and the Austrian School of economics are two of the internationally most influential intellectual movements with Viennese roots. By and large independently of each other, both have been subject to detailed historical and philosophical investigations for the last two dec-ades. However, in spite of numerous connections and interactions be-tween the two groups, their relationship has captured surprisingly sparse attention. My dissertation focuses on the many-faceted juxtaposition of two supposedly antagonistic championsof Viennese Late Enlightenment: logical empiricist Otto Neurath and (...)
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  • Otto Neurath’s Scientific Utopianism Revisited-A Refined Model for Utopias in Thought Experiments.Alexander Linsbichler & Ivan Ferreira da Cunha - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2):233-258.
    Otto Neurath’s empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to political economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath’s utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist’s model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist’s model more adequately complies with many uses (...)
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  • Identity Theft: A Thought Experiment on the Fragility of Identity.David Menčik - 2020 - Conatus 5 (1):71.
    This paper intends to discuss some aspects of what we conceive as personal identity: what it consists in, as well as its alleged fragility. First I will try to justify the methodology used in this paper, that is, the use of allegories in ontological debates, especialy in the form of thought experiments and science fiction movies. Then I will introduce an original thought experiment I call “Who am I actually?,” one that was coined with the intent to shed light on (...)
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  • Experiments in Thought.Walter Hopp - 2014 - Perspectives on Science 22 (2):242-263.
    . What are thought experiments, and how do they generate knowledge? More specifically, what sorts of intentional acts must one perform in order to carry out a thought experiment, what sorts of objects are such acts directed toward, and how are those objects made present in such acts? I argue on phenomenological grounds that the proper objects of thought experiments are, in certain cases, uninstantiated universals and relations among them. I will also argue that, in the best of cases, we (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ciência, Imaginação e Valores Na Virada Energética Alemã: Um Exemplo da Metodologia de Neurath Para a Tecnologia Social.Ivan F. Da Cunha & Alexander Linsbichler - 2023 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 64 (156):673-700.
    ABSTRACT Neurath’s scientific utopianism is the proposal that the social sciences should engage in the elaboration, development, and comparison of counterfactual scenarios, the ‘utopias’. Such scenarios can be understood as centerpieces of scientific thought experiments, that is, in exercises of imagination that not only promote conceptual revision, but also stimulate creativity to deal with experienced problems, as utopias are efforts to imagine what the future could look like. Moreover, utopian thought experiments can offer scientific knowledge to inform political debates and (...)
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  • Studying scientific thought experiments in their context: Albert Einstein and electromagnetic induction.Jan Potters & Bert Leuridan - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 58:1-11.
    This article concerns the way in which philosophers study the epistemology of scientific thought experiments. Starting with a general overview of the main contemporary philosophical accounts, we will first argue that two implicit assumptions are present therein: first, that the epistemology of scientific thought experiments is solely concerned with factual knowledge of the world; and second, that philosophers should account for this in terms of the way in which individuals in general contemplate these thought experiments in thought. Our goal is (...)
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  • Introduction to Special Issue of Perspectives on Science.Yiftach Fehige & Michael T. Stuart - 2014 - Perspectives on Science 22 (2):167-178.
    This is an introduction to a special issue of Perspectives on Science, the outcome of a workshop entitled "Thought Experiments in Science: Four Blind Spots," held at the University of Toronto, March 23rd, 2012. The recent revival in philosophical study of thought experiments has been limited to fields like epistemology, science studies, and metaphilosophy. With this issue we hope to facilitate a discussion about how some other disciplinary perspectives might bear on the subject; specifically, the history of philosophy, literary studies, (...)
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  • (4 other versions)Thought Experiments.Yiftach J. H. Fehige & James R. Brown - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 25 (1):135-142.
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  • And So On. Two Theories of Regress Arguments in Philosophy.Jan Willem Wieland - 2012 - Dissertation,
    This dissertation is on infinite regress arguments in philosophy. Its main goals are to explain what such arguments from many distinct philosophical debates have in common, and to provide guidelines for using and evaluating them. Two theories are reviewed: the Paradox Theory and the Failure Theory. According to the Paradox Theory, infinite regress arguments can be used to refute an existentially or universally quantified statement (e.g. to refute the statement that at least one discussion is settled, or the statement that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Thought Experiments, Formalization, and Disagreement.Sören Häggqvist - 2019 - Topoi 38 (4):801-810.
    In the last decade, philosophers have offered a number of proposals concerning the logical form of hypothetical cases, or thought experiments, as these are used for purposes of testing philosophical claims. In this paper, I discuss what the desiderata for a formal proposal are. Employing a comparison with general philosophy of science, I suggest that one important desideratum is to highlight recurrent patterns of disagreement surrounding cases. I advocate a proposal in propositional modal logic which, I argue, better meets this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Thought Experiments, Formalization, and Disagreement.Sören Häggqvist - 2019 - Topoi 38 (4):801-810.
    In the last decade, philosophers have offered a number of proposals concerning the logical form of hypothetical cases, or thought experiments, as these are used for purposes of testing philosophical claims. In this paper, I discuss what the desiderata for a formal proposal are. Employing a comparison with general philosophy of science, I suggest that one important desideratum is to highlight recurrent patterns of disagreement surrounding cases. I advocate a proposal in propositional modal logic which, I argue, better meets this (...)
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  • (1 other version)The ‘If’ in the ‘What If’.Daniele Sgaravatti - 2019 - Topoi 38 (4):811-820.
    In this paper, I defend the view that any good account of the logical form of thought experiments should contain a conditional. Moreover, there are some reasons to think it should be a counterfactual conditional. First, I defend Williamson’s account of the logical form of thought experiments against a competing account offered by Ichikawa and Jarvis. The two accounts have a similar structure, but Williamson’s posits a counterfactual conditional where Ichikawa and Jarvis’ posits a strict conditional. Williamson’s motivation is related (...)
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