- new discussions concerning the impact of experimental philosophy, cross-cultural comparison studies, metaphilosophy, computer simulations, idealization, dialectics, cognitive science, the artistic nature of thought experiments, and metaphysical issues.
This broad ranging Companion goes backwards through history and sideways across disciplines. It also engages with philosophical perspectives from empiricism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, pluralism, contextualism, and neo-Kantianism to phenomenology. This volume will be valuable for anyone studying the methods of philosophy or any discipline that employs thought experiments, as well as anyone interested in the power and limits of the mind.
The Routledge Companion To Thought Experiments (Routledge Philosophy Companions) Michael T 12
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Thought experiments are basically devices of the imagination. They areemployed for various purposes such an entertainment, education,conceptual analysis, exploration, hypothesizing, theory selection,theory implementation, etc. Some applications are more controversialthan others. Few would object to thought experiments that serve toillustrate complex states of affairs, or those that are used ineducational contexts. The situation is different, however, withrespect to the appropriation of imagined scenarios to investigatereality (very broadly conceived to include things like electrons,tables, rain, beliefs, morals, people, numbers, universes, and evendivine beings). It is this use of thought experiments that attractsmost of the attention inside and outside of philosophical discourse.Significant is the overlap here with many other central philosophicaltopics, such as the nature of the imagination, the importance ofunderstanding in contrast to explanation, the role of intuition inhuman cognition, and the relationship between fiction and truth.Moreover, thought experiments are interdisciplinary in two importantrespects. Firstly, not only philosophers study them as a research topic, butalso historians, cognitive scientists, psychologists, etc. Secondly,they are used in many disciplines, including biology, economics,history, mathematics, philosophy, and physics (although,interestingly, not with the same frequency in each).
The two most often repeated arguments against this sort of Platonismare: it does not identify criteria to distinguish good from badthought experiments, and it violates the principle of ontologicalparsimony. These seem weak objections. Perhaps they find widespreadacceptance because Platonism seems to be unfashionable these days (seeGrundmann 2018), given the general popularity of various forms ofnaturalism. If intuitions really do the job in a thought experiment,the first objection is weak because neither rationalists norempiricists have a theory about the reliability of intuitions. So theobjection should be that intuitions probably just do not matter inhuman cognition. However, there are good reasons to question the truthof this claim (see Myers 2004). This is not to marginalize theproblems that arise when admitting intuitions as a source of knowledgeand justification, especially in philosophy (see Hitchcock 2012).
We conclude with an interesting, but still relatively unexplored issuethat concerns the relative importance of thought experiments indifferent disciplines. Physics and philosophy use them extensively.Chemistry, by contrast, seems to have few or none at all. Why is thisthe case? Perhaps it is merely an historical accident that chemistsnever developed a culture of doing thought experiments. Perhaps it istied to some deep feature of the discipline itself (see Snooks 2006).Economics and history use thought experiments, but apparently notanthropology. A good explanation would likely tell us a lot about thestructure of these disciplines.
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Montuschi, Eleonora (2000)Metaphor in science. In: Newton-Smith, William, (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Blackwell companions to philosophy. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp. 277-282. ISBN 9780631230205
Montuschi, Eleonora (2016)Objectivity. In: McIntyre, Lee and Rosenberg, Alex, (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science. Routledge philosophy companions. Routledge, New York, USA, pp. 281-291. ISBN 9781138825758
Worrall, John (2000)Pragmatic factors in theory-acceptance. In: Newton-Smith, William, (ed.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Blackwell companions to philosophy. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, pp. 349-357. ISBN 9780631230205 2ff7e9595c
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