SYSTEMATIC ACCOUNT OF THE ARGUMENTATIVE ROLE OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

• Authors: Agerbo Mørch Michael , Ottesen Søvik Atle
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

What is the role of thought experiments in scientific exploration? Can they provide us with new knowledge about the world? In a recent article, Lorenzo Sartori argues that thought experiments function like ordinary (material) experiments: Both material experiments and thought experiments are made in a specific context, which must then be extrapolated and generalized to say something true about the world. This article discusses and criticizes Sartori’s proposal. It suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding thought experiments, their argumentative role, and how they provide new knowledge about the world. The presented framework is a coherentist framework, where coherence has three aspects: consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness. The proposal is that the argumentative role of thought experiments is to demonstrate the presence or absence of consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness, thereby strengthening a theory, weakening a theory, or showing one theory to be better than another. This is the way thought experiments provides new knowledge about the world, since the way we learn something new about the world is by discovering which theories about the world are most coherent.

Keywords

EN

COHERENCE THEORY; LORENZO SARTORI; SCIENTIFIC EPISTEMOLOGY; THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 2 – 21

Contributors

author

Agerbo Mørch Michael

• Fjellhaug International University College, Leifsgade 33.6, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5712-208X

author

Ottesen Søvik Atle

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8616-7105

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31101