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    Thought experiments never go beyond the empirical premise... — Carmelics
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    Thought experiments never go beyond the empirical premises in a way to which any empiricist would object.

    Skepticism
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Thought experiments are arguments from empirically grounded premises.
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    • 2.Such arguments proceed only by deductive or inductive rules of inference.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Some thought experiments, like Kripke's Gödel case, generate modal intuitions about necessity that outrun any empirical observation or inductive generalization.
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    • 2.Modal knowledge about what is necessarily or essentially true cannot be derived from empirical premises alone without smuggling in rationalist commitments.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Norton's empiricist reconstruction of thought experiments systematically fails for cases like Einstein's elevator, where the equivalence principle is not derived from prior experience but constitutes a novel conceptual stipulation.
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    • 2.When a thought experiment's conclusion depends on idealizations that are physically unrealizable, it cannot be reconstructed as an argument from genuinely empirical premises without distorting its epistemic structure.
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    Related

    Modal knowledge about what is necessarily or essentially true cannot be derived ...Norton's empiricist reconstruction of thought experiments systematically fails f...Some thought experiments, like Kripke's Gödel case, generate modal intuitions ab...Such arguments proceed only by deductive or inductive rules of inference.
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    Thought experiments are arguments from empirically grounded premises.When a thought experiment's conclusion depends on idealizations that are physica...

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    Thought experiments are arguments from empirically grounded premises.83%Human nature cannot be proved by empirical research.79%Experience and scientific experiment provide a different kind of knowl...79%Thought experiments can teach us something new about the world without...79%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: thought-experiment
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    John D. Norton is the most influential advocate of what we call “the argument view” of thought experiments (see Norton 1991, 1993, 1996, 2004a,b, 2008). Even though the argument view seems to be a natural option for empiricists, it seems that most empiricists find Norton’s argument view too strong. For this reason, many participants in the debate about thought experiments place themselves between the extremes of Norton and Brown, who function as useful foils for apparently more moderate outlooks
    Extraction notes

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

    Details

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