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    Thought experiments can teach us something new about the ... — Carmelics
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    Thought experiments can teach us something new about the world without new empirical data.

    Truth & Knowledge
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.A well-conceived thought experiment can bring on a crisis or create an anomaly in the reigning theory and contribute to paradigm change.
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    • 2.Thought experiments help us re-conceptualize the world in a new way.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Thought experiments draw exclusively on concepts and intuitions derived from prior empirical experience.
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    • 2.Reorganizing or recombining existing empirical knowledge cannot constitute genuinely new knowledge about the world.
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    • 3.Therefore, any insight produced by thought experiments is analytic repackaging, not synthetic discovery about reality.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Quine's critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction entails that purely a priori reasoning cannot be cleanly separated from empirical commitments.
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    • 2.If thought experiments smuggle in hidden empirical assumptions, their conclusions are only as reliable as those unexamined assumptions.
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    • 3.The appearance of learning without new data is thus an illusion masking implicit empirical premises that have not been rigorously tested.
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    Related

    A well-conceived thought experiment can bring on a crisis or create an anomaly i...If thought experiments smuggle in hidden empirical assumptions, their conclusion...Quine's critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction entails that purely a pri...Reorganizing or recombining existing empirical knowledge cannot constitute genui...
    +4 moreShow less
    The appearance of learning without new data is thus an illusion masking implicit...Therefore, any insight produced by thought experiments is analytic repackaging, ...Thought experiments draw exclusively on concepts and intuitions derived from pri...Thought experiments help us re-conceptualize the world in a new way.

    Similar

    Thought experiments help us re-conceptualize the world in a new way.84%Experience and scientific experiment provide a different kind of knowl...82%Thought experiments never go beyond the empirical premises in a way to...79%Such facts can only be known through extensive observation, data gathe...78%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: thought-experiment
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    “Conceptual constructivism”, as we could call it, is among the empiricist alternatives to the argument view. The position has been taken up by Van Dyck (2003) to account especially for Heisenberg’s ɣ-ray microscope; but also by Gendler (1998) to makes sense of Galileo’s falling body thought experiment. Gendler’s proposal was advanced in more general terms by Camilleri (2014) in order to establish a firm middle ground between the views of Norton and Brown. Conceptual constructivism was first prop
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit