Introduction to Thought Experiments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Does it show that our judgments about these thought experiments are unreliable, as Rovane (1998) and Szabó Gendler (1998) argue? Or does it show that there is no fact of the matter as to whether personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity as opposed to bodily continuity, as Sider (2001) argues? But these discussions are premised on a falsehood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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 paper explores mappings, musings and ‘thought experiments’ in literary geography to consider how they may contribute to geoethical pedagogy and research.

Computer simulation (CS) and thought experiments (TE) seem to produce knowledge about the world without intervening in the world.

Among Wittgenstein’s thought experiments, the wood-sellers is one of the most controversial.

The existence of two massive theoretical anomalies is demonstrated through two straightforward thought experiments.

Problems discussed include the moral policing of fictive thought experiments rather than actions taken in the world, the confounding heteronomies of cultural and personality variation, issues of selfhood and determinism, and confusions between the ethical and the political.

phenomena can often be analysed in a visually clear way by thought experiments.

Methodology Engaging in thought experiments, conceptual analysis, providing counterexamples, and appealing to moral intuitions, we challenge the standard consequentialist version of the maximization principle and make a case for adopting an alternative deontological version.

We show (i) that people respond consistently across conditions aimed at ‘filling in the details’ of thought experiments, (ii) that risk attitude does not seem relevant to knowledge ascription, (iii) that people's knowledge ascriptions do not vary due to views about defeasibility of knowledge.

It also allows one to reasonably interpret some of the more recent thought experiments proposed.

In the challenge to manipulate and enhance C4 photosynthesis, steady-state models of leaf photosynthesis provide an important tool for gas exchange analysis and thought experiments that can explore photosynthetic pathway changes.

That is, as Freeman Dyson taught (2015), Einstein and early twentieth-century theoretical physicists may have invented the thought experiment, but, and this is a critical “but”, they did thought experiments in the expectation that empirical researchers would confirm or disprove these.

This study sought to investigate the purposes of students conducting thought experiments while solving physics problems.

I will base my arguments on two thought experiments.

The supercharged nature of the Earth’s geothermal core can be demonstrated by three thought experiments exhibiting it is tremendously more powerful than any other terrestrial object in the solar system (planet or moon).

Using two thought experiments to critically locate variations in factors and approaches, dilemmas and challenges in addressing mobility inequality for the marginalized are exposed.

Humanistic consequentialism emerges as a pressure we can put on one another to be aware of the results of our behavior rather than a strict requirement to maximize the hedonic results of our actions; implications for the “thought experiments” of media are discussed.

In other words, drawing on philosophical thinking, thought experiments, and existing practices surrounding expression and functionality, this Articles argues that two acts of authorship cannot result in the same artistic work (only "structurally identical" works), but two acts of invention can result in the same invention.

A particular approach to ethical reasoning has come to dominate much Anglo-American philosophy, one which assumes that the most rigorous method is to proceed by analysis of thought experiments.

In the challenge to manipulate and enhance C4 photosynthesis, steady state models of leaf photosynthesis provide and important tool for gas exchange analysis and thought experiments that can explore photosynthetic pathway changes.

Twin paradox thought experiments for heat engines prove heat flux to be Lorentz variant.

Our approach sheds light on simulation of large practical problems with intermediate-scale quantum computers, with potential applications in chemistry, quantum many-body physics, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity thought experiments.

Many thought experiments (TEs) are used to probe theoretical statements.

This article is part of the results of the theoretical research Semiotics and the Thought Experiments in teaching and learning in mathematics.

Our aim in this paper is to show that the discussion of surprise can be usefully extended to thought experiments and theoretical derivations.

Skepticism about the legitimacy of thought experiments calls into question the reliability of intuitions to justify philosophical theses.

For example, physicists used sound theories and solid mathematics in thought experiments, and came up with seemingly simple equations to explain the behaviour of very diverse systems, from sub-atomic particles to the largest clusters of galaxies.

Building on our model of non-rehearsing teachers’ development of adaptive expertise in rehearsal debriefs, we examine thought experiments as a mechanism for pedagogical reasoning and resisting prescription.

Similarly, Einstein used penetrating but simple thought experiments to illustrate complex physical facts.

Simple thought experiments are presented here where the inferred time dilation and the observed relativistic Doppler effect give quite opposite answers.

Wigner's friend and related thought experiments demonstrate that accounts by different observers described by the rules of quantum mechanics may be contradictory.

Third, a simple summary, along with some thought experiments and exercises, round off most chapters.

In the current work, thought experiments reveal important additions to this idea regarding the apparent effects of external energy on the nature of matter and particles.

This they argue, through a series of thought experiments, goes beyond the analysis of spatial connectivity, to also provide a basis for quantifying the qualities of a spatial layout.

What results from such critical studies of capitalism too often result in apathy rather than positive action, it tends to deal less with ‘the real world’ than thought experiments about possible worlds.

In the historical context of Einstein’s theories and thought experiments, we discuss some more recent discoveries of animal sensory capabilities alien to us humans and potentially valuable for bio-inspired design improvements.

Roger Crisp put forward thought experiments which might be taken to suggest that having deep personal relationships has only instrumental value as a means to other elements of well-being.

This sets the stage for the development of an appropriately sophisticated “descriptivist” ac- count of meaning and reference that would be better suited for a widened range of Kripke-Putnam style thought experiments.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent authors including Jean Piaget have drawn attention to Edmond Goblot’s account of mathematical thought experiments.

The literature on thought experiments has been steadily expanding since 1986.

They assess these (often opposing) effects and conduct thought experiments to quantify the performance impact of core-component outsourcing.

On the other hand, dystopian arguments and narratives can themselves constitute a useful mode of political theorizing especially in realist Political Theory for instance through the plausible design of worst-case scenarios and thought experiments – as long as their appropriate function and their pitfalls are kept in mind.

Twin paradox thought experiments for heat engines prove heat flux to be Lorentz variant.

We use a series of thought experiments that combine theoretical assumptions underlying labor markets in Baumol and Lewis with the accounting of a sectoral decomposition of the labor share.

As an alternative, I propose the Universal Pure Pleasure Machine, which avoids the pitfalls of other thought experiments and provides a more targeted probe of intuitions toward hedonism.

Non-trained movers and scientific thinkers together participate in “choreostorming” which is a non-binary process where all participants work as science thinkers and artists to develop, and extend, thought experiments into the movement laboratory.

We analyze contemporary thought experiments with some Zeno objects and infinity machines.

Science fiction writers often explore dystopian themes and use their work as a vehicle for thought experiments about how society might cope with major global events.

Five studies involving both thought experiments and naturalistic scenarios provided evidence of neurodualism among laypeople and, to some extent, even practicing psychotherapists.

Whatmight theorists dowith audiences, in thought experiments and in real-life experiments and other empirical inquiries, in order to understand them better and, perhaps, to help audiences understand themselves better?What are the potential uses and gratifications ofmedia —and the interests of audiences in particular forms of media and communication? The active audience was in for yet another round of revitalization.