Introduction to Thought Experiment

I begin by presenting a striking thought experiment to serve as an analogy for the evolution of morality; I then show why calibrationist views of higher-order evidence are crucial to the evolutionary debunking project; I outline a new rationale for why finding out that morality was selected to promote cooperation suggests that our moral judgments are unreliable; and I explain why evolutionary debunking arguments do not depend on our having a dedicated faculty for moral cognition.

Their reality-based imagination is evident in a variety of contexts: early pretend play, envisioning the future, judgments about what is possible, the instructive role of thought experiments, tool making, and figurative drawing.

Finally, I question how we should think of the role of intuition in thought experiments figuring centrally in Mele's work.

ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons.

We integrate these two fields with a thought experiment, proposing ways in which strategists can work with, and through time in managing and turning around declines.

Certain scenes in Goethe's literary works—including most prominently, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; The Elective Affinities), Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years), Pandora (1807/08), and Faust(1808/32)—can be read as thought experiments that offer ontological conceptions of force in order to explore its informing oppositions of movement and metamorphosis, potentiality and actuality, as well as trans-discursivity and non-discursivity.

But as I have tried to explore planning theory and practice together, a series of particular trials and errors, thought experiments, and exercises have been striking.

This article is about the remarkable explosion in the literature on thought experiments since the 1980s.

What if the profound thought experiments and social insights of our fantasy-fiction writers were taken as serious lessons for understanding the social role of technology in our world? The contributors to this Rethinking Marxism special issue, bringing the powerful and flexible tools of Marxist analysis to bear, write in the magic-suppressing language of technology while wisely asking the questions that storytellers ask about magic.

The author then seeks to explain the role of thought experiments in philosophical work on well-being.

The present article is motivated toward delving into the concept of entropy, a fundamental consequence of the second law of thermodynamics with particular emphasis on the thought experiment by James C.

The story functions as a thought experiment for first readers to encourage them to establish trusting relations with Roman officials in times of trial.

A thought experiment demonstrates that physicalism about consciousness entails a paradoxical duplication of physical information.

The article is essentially a thought experiment.

The thought experiment identifies how a school can meet its educational and social justice mission in response to the historic crises of 2020.

The author then puts forth, by way of thought experimentation, potential considerations for future research and discovery.

Using Mary’s room thought experiment, one can argue that physicalism implies qualitative physicalism.

Gain a better understanding of human behavior by exploring thought experiments in Shakespearean plays and the historical roots of experimental psychology within early modern literature.

First, philosophers should use simulations for many of the same reasons we currently use thought experiments.

The fictional scenario serves as a thought experiment: it provokes the question of what remains of being human if all traditional and modern concepts are no longer applicable.

Mele’s thought experiment for externalism about moral res­ponsibility, which suggests that the agent’s history partially determines whether the agent is morally responsible for particular actions, or the consequences of actions.

Reducing supply chain risks presented by climate changes is not a long-term thought experiment but an imperative that must be addressed today.

Edgeworth's fiction might seem worlds away from actual colonial policy; but by contextualizing her writing amid debates about the slave trade and proposals for the cultivation of sugar in Bengal, the chapter shows that her stories were important and highly regarded thought experiments in colonial governance.

Scheffler’s thought experiment—based on a doomsday scenario that Beckett’s characters already appear to inhabit—seeks the achievement of the ordinary in an age of climate change by disclosing our evaluative dependence on future generations.

Einstein’s derivation of special relativity theory (SRT), based on hypothetical reasoning and thought experiments, is regarded as a prime example of physics theory development.

We will examine some of these cases and make a plea for a more systematic use of symbiotic technology in experimentally guided thought experiments aimed at studying the sense of agency.

In order to predict an event that may occur, and to predict human behavior in these situations as well as a human response to punishment when someone violates a rule, it is good to conduct a thought experiment.

Indeed, the Maxwell's demon thought experiment suggests a correlation between a microscopic (quantum) system and a macroscopic (classical) apparatus, which leads to an energy transfer from the quantum vacuum to the physical world, similar to particle creation from a vacuum.

In this paper, I argue that the scope of the mind is wider than described in the thought experiment presented by C&C, while also exploring the question, "where does the mind stop, and the rest of the world begin?.

Such methods of scientific and pedagogical research as synthesis, thought experiment, pilot experiment were used.

We argue that the variational method in Wald type thought experiments, involves order of magnitude problems when one imposes the fact that $$\delta M$$ δ M is inherently a first order quantity itself.

We use the results of this first study to inform a second study based on a philosophical thought experiment known as Mary’s Room.

Then through a relevant thought experiment we move on to outline some further ethical concerns that are connected to the use of wearables by minors, to wit the issue of informed consent in the case of minors, forcing them to live in the spotlight, and compromising their right to an open future.

Hapgood and Arcadia further engage with science on the structural level, thus becoming thought experiments reflecting upon science.

The thought experiment imparts new lessons for both practitioners of collaborative methodologies and students of comparative politics.

The history of the philosophy of thought experiments (TEs) has touched on the work of Kuhn, Popper, Duhem, Mach, Lakatos, and other big names of the twentieth-century.

First, the Parsegian’s empirical potential based on a mesoscopic liquid crystal theory is employed to describe the interaction energy among coarse-grained DNA cylinders; then, the thought experiment method and the force balance method of nonlinear elastic network nodes are combined to characterize the elastic modulus, prestress and thermal expansion coefficient of DNA adsorption films; finally, based on an effective macroscopic continuum model for DNA microbeam deformation, we study the microcantilever resonance frequency shifts caused by DNA adsorptions and the temperature effect on the microcantilever static deflections, respectively.

As in the “Schrödinger’s cat” thought experiment, the context-dependent constituents of the—by the time of diagnosis—well-established tumor microenvironment may display a tumor-protective and -destructive role.

We then provide a thought experiment, introducing a device that we intend to serve as an intuition pump for thinking about how the brain processes for attention might be organized, and that illustrates the features of the biological processes that might ultimately answer the question.

To perform my analysis, I use a thought experiment, adapted from Hilary Putnam’s famous Twin-Earth examples.

We refute a recently proposed thought experiment namely the Dead-Alive Physicist (DAP) whose authors claim it to be the falsification of the von Neumann interpretation in Quantum Mechanics.

In their crucial thought experiment, it can be argued that Otto’s notebook is similar to Inga’s biological memory in that they are functionally equivalent, and it seems that the only relevant difference between them is concerned with their being located inside/outside the skull/skin.

This paper makes this thought experiment into a real one by using a language that behaves in exactly this way: Spanish has pulgar ‘thumb’ (< pollex), a non-colloquial form.

Some teaching approaches focus on thought experiments to express conceptual features of SRT, while others use virtual environments to provide realistic visualization of relativistic effects.

The history of how philosophers have dealt with thought experiments in science is the main focus of this special issue.

FindingsAfter reviewing the current research themes in public administration and the methodological nature of agent-based modeling, we found that agent-based modeling can help researchers to advance theories by means of sophisticated thought experiment which is not possible by formal modeling and verbal reasoning.

the informal elicitation of judgements in thought experiments for the purpose of philosophical theorising, has been much criticised in recent years.

We offer a critical thought experiment on just how much potential low-carbon options have to provide positive externalities compared to fossil fuels.

This article discusses the important and influential views of John Burgess on the nature of mathematical rigour and John Norton on the nature of thought experiments.

Dilwyn Knox opens his chapter with a witty thought experiment (71–74): if all of Bruno’s writings had been lost except for book 2 of De immenso, we would know almost everything we need to know about his cosmology.

Bernard Williams’s influential essay ‘The Self and the Future” (Williams 1970) focuses on a type of thought experiment frequently discussed in the literature on personal identity over time: so-called ‘body-switching’ cases.

In physics, whenever we cannot do an experiment for physical, technological, financial or ethical reasons, we use "thought experiment".

This work suggests that counterfactual thought experiments are a promising pedagogical tool.

Part I argues that a number of popular philosophical tools such as thought experiments are poorly calibrated for providing guidance to policymakers.

In this article, a theoretical approach that combined model construction, thought experiment, and mathematical analysis was developed to study this elusive form of molecules.

We propose a research thought experiment that utilizes the multi-trait, multi-method matrix, and bifactor modeling to help understand the true overlap between measurement structures of cognitive and creative aptitudes.

Students then learn about Einstein’s conception of gravitythrough the analysis of free-falling bodies and thought experiments.

Thought experiments are also elegantly combined with a discussion of the most recent experimental findings.

An experiment by Proietti et al purporting to instantiate the ‘Wigner’s Friend’ thought experiment is discussed.

The viability of interpretations that endorse relative facts has come to the fore in recent debates surrounding the famous Wigner’s friend thought experiment, which has been revived in a number of surprising new variations [12, 33, 37–44].

The existence of two massive theoretical anomalies, regarding the contemporary science’s photon/light phenomena based paradigms, was irrefutably proven in Brauns (2021) through two thought experiments.

Information-driven engines that rectify thermal fluctuations are a modern realization of the Maxwell-demon thought experiment.

Because ART can be derived from a thought experiment about a universal problem of error correction in a changing world, its expanding applications to the development of autonomously intelligent systems should transform future technologies.

We study two approaches for embedding exogenous probabilities in the context of the thought experiments suggested by Mark Machina.

This chapter explores a series of thought experiments for an investigation of what one casually calls the image.

Two Ellsberg-style thought experiments are described to challenge the meaning of partial ambiguity further, and an alternative interpretation, based on a more ambiguous relation, is discussed.

The use of modeling and thought experiments contributes to enhancing students’ understanding of real-life experiments and theories in physics.

My derivation of medicine’s distinctive ethics begins with a thought experiment demonstrating that trust is at the core of medical practice.

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences.

Here, the author discusses Einstein’s “light clock” thought experiment based on the two guiding principles of STR.

This will be done by bringing into play various thought experiments and a distinction between relevance (of an event or a fact about the occurrence of an event) to the moral evaluation of a world and moral (and psychological) involvement (in an event or in a fact about the occurrence of an event).

Then, they conducted a thought experiment that justified it.

I theorise the speculative and visionary in biomedicine in the context of ethnographic methodology by drawing on ‘thought experiments’ conducted with stem cell scientists as shared acts of future-oriented contemplation.

To explore this further, consider a thought experiment: In this experiment, we have a complicated quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) model in which there are many states and even more interactions between states.

These empirical results, together with consideration of thought experiments and analysis of everyday perceptual performance, lead to a conclusion that biologically-plausible object perception models do not even come close to matching our perceptual abilities.

This second claim follows from a thought experiment in which we imagine that the dataset is resampled from the conditional distribution after the mechanism has committed to its answers.

It represents a thought experiment that consolidates complexity by melding certain unifying natural science concepts into a coherent reality.

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works.