Abstract
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 objects, specifically fictions, and then use this analysis to characterize their content and ultimately assess their epistemic success. Taking my starting point from Kendall Walton’s account of representation (Mimesis as make-believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990), I argue that the best way to understand the content of thought experiments is to treat them as props for imagining fictional worlds. Ultimately, I maintain that, in terms of their form and content, thought experiments share more with literary fictions and pictorial representations than with either argumentation or observations of the Platonic realm. Moreover, while they inspire imaginings, thought experiments themselves are not mental kinds. My approach redirects attention towards what fixes the content of any given thought experiment and scrutinizes the assumptions, cognitive capacities and conventions that generate them. This view helps to explain what seems plausible about Brown’s, Norton’s, and the mental modelers’ views.
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Notes
There are a number of related projects that suggest this may be a particularly fruitful approach. Elsewhere I have employed Walton’s theory to analyze scientific images of various kinds (Meynell 2008a, b, 2012) and Toon (2012) and Frigg (2010) have offered Waltonian approaches to scientific models. There is also already a literature that investigates the similarities between TEs and literary fictions (e.g., Davies 2007; Swirski 2007; Ichikawa and Jarvis 2009; Gaetens 2009).
While it is more natural to associate the mental modeling account with Nersessian and Miščević, I group Gendler with them as her view shares their emphasis on non-propositional mental processes as being definitive of TEs. Though Brown also focuses on non-propositional mental processes, the mental modelers do not share his commitment to the Platonic realm or the capacity of TEs to help us see into it.
See Sorenson (2012) for an account of how this might happen.
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Acknowledgments
Versions of this paper were presented to a meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy Departments of Dalhousie University and the University of Utah; I gratefully acknowledge the contributions made by the comments and questions from these audiences. Many thanks also to Mélanie Frappier and Jim Brown for teaching me so much about thought experiments as well as the anonymous reviewers for Synthese for their helpful feedback.
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Meynell, L. Imagination and insight: a new acount of the content of thought experiments. Synthese 191, 4149–4168 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0519-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0519-x