![]() ![]() While thought experiments also fall apart in this way, they do not require the same lengthy process of discovery and factual research. Moreover, if we are going into the research with an agenda, we risk spending all that time and energy researching a case study only to find the facts do not bear out the way we wanted. We lack the expertise (and many of us lack the patience) to spend days or months finding suitable case studies then checking that we understand enough of the nuances of the case study in order to give an accurate verdict on it. Why might I choose to develop a thought experiment rather than searching for actual examples? One immediate reason is that many philosophers aren’t trained to collect data to support philosophical claims in the same way that, for example, anthropologists are. Suppose I wanted to convince you that a certain philosophical theory has a counterexample. Pragmatic virtue #1: Thought experiments require fewer facts Instead, I will lay out a number of pragmatic virtues possessed by thought experiments and suggest those are what drive philosophers’ love of imaginary cases. But I do want to challenge the idea that philosophers use thought experiments solely due to their epistemic virtues. They do let us tease apart possibilities that we otherwise could not. I do not want to deny that thought experiments have their place in philosophy. Perhaps the sterility of thought experiments prevented philosophers from seeing the relationship between epistemology and morality that messier real-life cases would have forced us to reckon with much sooner. If moral encroachment is right, the connection between the moral and epistemic has been right under philosophers’ noses the whole time but only recently taken seriously. For example, proponents of moral encroachment argue that whether one knows or is justified depends on the moral stakes of the situation (Basu 2019 Fritz 2017). ![]() Recently, however, philosophy has seen a rise in accounts that argue moral and epistemic matters are intimately tied, despite philosophers’ tendency to uncouple them in thought experiments. Gettier cases are about knowledge, and including morally loaded terms just muddies the waters (See (Dennett 2011, 10) for an example of this sort of move). If someone told us a Gettier case about whether or not Smith, a puppy killer, formed a racist belief about Jones, we would deride the case as including unnecessary details. Moreover, is the cleanliness of thought experiments really a virtue? Thought experiments allow us to think about moral, epistemic, and metaphysical issues in a vacuum. Perhaps they aren’t such a good guide to possibility and necessity after all. 2012) and the personality of the people observing them (Cokely and Feltz 2009 Bartels and Pizarro 2011). This includes the order in which thought experiments are presented (Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2015 Liao et al. For one, gobs of experimental evidence has arisen in the last two decades showing that, while not utterly unreliable, our reactions to thought experiments (that is, our intuitions), are affected by all sorts of things we don’t think they should be affected by (see Machery 2017, chap. There are nonetheless reasons to doubt that these are actual strengths of thought experiments. In a similarly epistemic vein, I’ve both witnessed others and caught myself telling undergraduates that philosophers use thought experiments because real-life cases are not “clean” enough. For example, metaphilosophers have defended the use of imaginary cases instead of facts by arguing that philosophers are interested in knowing things about possibility and necessity rather than actuality (Bealer 1998 Ludwig 2007). When pushed on this, typical ways of unpacking this idea appeal to the epistemology of thought experiments. If you ask a thought-experiment-loving philosopher (and I count myself among them) why they use thought experiments, you are apt to get an answer like “it lets us control for variables that would be impossible to control for in real life”. All of these are either thought experiments or include thought experiments playing essential roles in the arguments. Ask a philosopher to list philosophy’s most influential arguments, and the list might include Plato’s cave, Gettier’s 1963 refutation of JTB, Foot and Thomsons’s Trolley cases, and Cartesian skepticism. ![]() ![]() Philosophers love thought experiments, and imagining non-actual events or dilemmas is as core to philosophy as any other method philosophers have. ![]()
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