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    Carmelics

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    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
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    Perspectives
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Thought experiments never go beyond the empirical premises in a way to which any empiricist would object.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 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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