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Thought Experiments And The Epistemology Of Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Roy A. Sorensen
Roy A. Sorensen*
Affiliation:
New York University Washington Sqaure, New York, NY, 10003, USA
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Extract

The aim of this paper is to show how thought experiments help us learn about laws. After providing examples of this kind of nomic illumination in the first section, I canvass explanations of our modal knowledge and opt for an evolutionary account. The basic application is that the laws of nature have led us to develop rough and ready intuitions of physical possibility which are then exploited by thought experimenters to reveal some of the very laws responsible for those intuitions. The good news is that natural selection ensures a degree of reliability for the intuitions. The bad news is that the evolutionary account seems to limit the range of reliable thought experiment to highly practical and concrete contexts. In the fifth section, I provide reasons for thinking that we are not as slavishly limited as a pessimistic construal of natural selection suggests. Nevertheless, I promote the idea that biology is a promising source of predictions and diagnoses of thought experiment failures.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 15 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1992

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References

1 This paper is the product of selective forces exerted by John Carroll, anonymous referees, and colloquia at Columbia University and the sixteenth annual Philosophy of Science conference in Dubrovnik.

2 The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1928), 267

3 The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1930), vii-ix

4 Loschmidt, J. ‘Ueber den Zustnd des Warmegleichgewichtes eines System von Korpern,’ Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien. Mathematisch-Naturwissisnschaftliche Klasse, Sitxungsberichte 59 Abth. 2 (1876) 137-9Google Scholar

5 Boltzmann, Ludwig ‘Bermerkungen uber einige Probleme der mechanischen Warmetheorie’ (1877), in Hasenhorl, F. ed., Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen von Ludwig Boltzmalnn (Leipzig: J.A. Barth 1909) II, 120Google Scholar

6 ‘The Nature of Laws,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977) 26

7 The contrast is made in Mersenne’s 1631-1632 correspondence with Jean Rey. The exchange is recounted on p. 237 of Pierre Duhem’s The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Philip P. Weiner, trans. (New York: Atheneum 1974).

8 James Robert Brown defends a Godelian position in The Labortltory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (London: Routledge 1991).

9 Whewell, William. unpublished passage from Of the Plurality of worlds (London: J .W. Parker & Son 1853Google Scholar), quoted in Butts’s, R.E. ‘Necessary Truth in Whewell’s Theory of Science’ American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965) 161-81; 179, n. 41Google Scholar

10 Ronald Curtis analyzes Darwin’s epistemological development in ‘Darwin as an Epistemologist,’ Annals of Science 44 (1987) 379-408.

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15 Mach’s most direct discussion is ‘On Thought Experiments,’ in Knowledge and Error (Dordrecht D. Reidel1976) orig. publ. in 1905. But he also comments on them in earlier works. The third chapter of my Thought Experiments (New York: Oxford University Press 1992) contains a detailed discussion of Mach’s theory of thought experiment.

16 ‘Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,’ Quarterly Review (1869)

17 ‘N Notebook,’ in Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of the Mind, Paul H. Barnett, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980), 78; see also The Descent of Man (New York: Hurst 1871), 49.

18 ‘Kants Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology,’ General Systems 7, L. von Bartalanffy and A. Rapoport, eds. (Ann Arbor, MI: Society for General Systems Research 1962) 23-35; 25. This is a translation from an article in Blatte fur Deutsche Philosophie 15 (1941) 94-125.

19 ‘Evolutionary Epistemology’ in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1974) 413-63; 447

20 Behind the Mirror, Ronald Taylor, trans. (London: Methuen 1977), 147

21 The game and its philosophical ramifications are engagingly presented by William Poundstone in The Recursive Universe (New York: William Morrow 1985).

22 Daniel Dennett recently used ‘Life’ to illuminate questions about the ontological status of beliefs. See his pro-‘Life’ ‘Real Patterns,’ Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991) 27-51.

23 Haber’s case for simulation is presented in ‘Flight Simulation,’ Scientific American (July 1986) 96-103; 103.

24 The Descent of Man, 99

25 ‘The Evolution of Rationality,’ Synthese 46 (1981) 95-120

26 Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1966), 15

27 See the fourth chapter of his Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon 1975).

28 A good sample of this research is contained in Judgment under Uncertainty, D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982).

29 ‘Deduction or Darwinian Algorithms? An Explanation of the “Elusive” Content Effect on the Wason Selection Task’ (Diss., Harvard University, 1985). Also see Cheng, P.W. and Holyoak’s, K.J. ‘Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas,’ Cognitive Psychology 17 (1985) 391-416.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

30 Pylyshyn asks his questions on pp. 227-8 of Computation and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1984).

31 Allan Franklin reviews the history of the law in The Principle of Inertia in the Middle Ages (Boulder, CO: Colorado Associated University Press 1976).

32 This theme is expressed in McCloskey’s, Michael ‘Naive Theories of Motion,’ in Mental Models, Gentner, Dedre and Stevens, Albert L. eds. (London: Lawrence Erlbaum 1983)Google Scholar.

33 John Clement reviews these criticisms in’ A Conceptual Model Discussed by Galileo and Used Intuitively by Physics Students,’ in Mental Models 325-39.