SYSTEMATIC ACCOUNT OF THE ARGUMENTATIVE ROLE OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

What is the role of thought experiments in scientific exploration? Can they provide us with new knowledge about the world? In a recent article, Lorenzo Sartori argues that thought experiments function like ordinary (material) experiments: Both material experiments and thought experiments are made in a specific context, which must then be extrapolated and generalized to say something true about the world. This article discusses and criticizes Sartori’s proposal. It suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding thought experiments, their argumentative role, and how they provide new knowledge about the world. The presented framework is a coherentist framework, where coherence has three aspects: consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness. The proposal is that the argumentative role of thought experiments is to demonstrate the presence or absence of consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness, thereby strengthening a theory, weakening a theory, or showing one theory to be better than another. This is the way thought experiments provides new knowledge about the world, since the way we learn something new about the world is by discovering which theories about the world are most coherent.