Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts
Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9004201777

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During the last decades of the twentieth century highly imaginative thought experiments were introduced in philosophy: Searle’s Chinese room, variations on the Brain-in-a-vat, Thomson’s violinist. At the same time historians of philosophy and science claimed the title of thought experiment for almost any argument: Descartes’ evil genius, Buridan’s ass, Gyges’ ring. In the early 1990s a systematic debate began concerning the epistemological status of thought experiments. The essays in this volume are an outcome of this debate. They were guided by the idea that, since we cannot forge a strict definition of thought experiments, we should at least tame the contemporary wild usage of this notion by analysing thought experiments from various periods, and thus clarify how they work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 15

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts
Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Author: Katerina Ierodiakonou

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-06-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9004201769

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By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.

Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

Author: Philip E. Tetlock

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1996-09-08

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 9780691027913

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Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Thought Experiment
Thought Experiment

Author: Tamar Szabo Gendler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1135706867

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This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases.

Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments
Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments

Author: Martin Cohen

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0470777257

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Wittgenstein’s Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments invites readers to participate actively in discovering the surprisingly powerful and fruitful tradition of "thought experiments." Gives a lively presentation of an "A to Z" of 26 fascinating and influential thought experiments from philosophy and science Presents vivid and often humorous discussion of the experiments, including strengths and weaknesses, historical context, and contemporary uses Provides a "how to" section for engaging in thought experiments Includes illustrations, mini-biographies, and suggestions for further reading.

Information & Experimental Knowledge
Information & Experimental Knowledge

Author: James Mattingly

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 022680478X

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An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice. What is experimental knowledge, and how do we get it? While there is general agreement that experiment is a crucial source of scientific knowledge, how experiment generates that knowledge is far more contentious. In this book, philosopher of science James Mattingly explains how experiments function. Specifically, he discusses what it is about experimental practice that transforms observations of what may be very localized, particular, isolated systems into what may be global, general, integrated empirical knowledge. Mattingly argues that the purpose of experimentation is the same as the purpose of any other knowledge-generating enterprise—to change the state of information of the knower. This trivial-seeming point has a non-trivial consequence: to understand a knowledge-generating enterprise, we should follow the flow of information. Therefore, the account of experimental knowledge Mattingly provides is based on understanding how information flows in experiments: what facilitates that flow, what hinders it, and what characteristics allow it to flow from system to system, into the heads of researchers, and finally into our store of scientific knowledge.

Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science
Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science

Author: Lorenzo Magnani

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 1179

ISBN-13: 3319305263

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This handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. It highlights the role of models as mediators between theory and experimentation, and as educational devices, as well as their relevance in testing hypotheses and explanatory functions. The Springer Handbook merges philosophical, cognitive and epistemological perspectives on models with the more practical needs related to the application of this tool across various disciplines and practices. The result is a unique, reliable source of information that guides readers toward an understanding of different aspects of model-based science, such as the theoretical and cognitive nature of models, as well as their practical and logical aspects. The inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity once they are constructed, adopted, and manipulated for different scientific and technological purposes is also discussed. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, the history of science, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive and computer science, physics and life sciences, as well as engineering, architecture, and economics, this Handbook uses numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations to promote a better understanding of the concepts. This also makes it highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds. All in all, the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science represents the definitive application-oriented reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning.

The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments
The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments

Author: Michael T Stuart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 709

ISBN-13: 1351705512

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Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, from antiquity to the trolley problem and quantum non-locality; · thought experiments in the humanities, arts, and sciences, including ethics, physics, theology, biology, mathematics, economics, and politics; · theories about the nature of thought experiments; · 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.

Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition
Time and Cosmology in Plato and the Platonic Tradition

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-02-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9004504699

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This book assembles an international team of scholars to move forward the study of Plato’s conception of time, to find fresh insights for interpreting his cosmology, and to reimagine the Platonic tradition.

Medieval Allegory as Epistemology
Medieval Allegory as Epistemology

Author: Marco Nievergelt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0192665839

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In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.