
What Is a Thought Experiment, Anyhow? (2006) [pdf] - lainon
https://philpapers.org/archive/PIGWIA-2.pdf
======
GregBuchholz
The parent article is about 99% fluff, but for people interested in Philosophy
of Science, John D. Norton (from the article) has a treasure trove of
interesting stuff.

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120702103247/http://www.p...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20120702103247/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html)

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdno...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/*)

Unfortunately our universities are big failure when it comes to properly
maintaining and archiving their websites. I guess the librarians have not been
involved when it comes to matters of IT. Anyway, you have to search for his
stuff on archive.org. For thought experiments, check out things like:

Thought Experiment Anti-Thought Experiment Pairs

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20120703003926/http://www.p...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20120703003926/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/TE-
antiTE/index.html)

and his papers on Maxwell's demon:

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20140309110028/http://www.p...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20140309110028/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/exorcism_phase_vol/exorcism_phase_vol.html)

[http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist1....](http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist1.pdf)

[http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist2.p...](http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist2.pdf)

~~~
mannykannot
Thanks for the links, and I see that they are of Norton's work. Going solely
on the article, I felt I could understand Norton's view, but in the author's
outline of Brown's view, I haven't been able to make the jump from "the laws
of gravity... are 'real' in that they exist, again, independently of human
observers" to "thought experiments are genuine examples of how the human mind
can 'perceive' laws of nature by simply thinking about reality." The first
thing I want to ask about that (beyond just how it works) is how can you tell
that you are not just making it up? Of course, one way would be to use
reasoning to see if your ideas are consistent with what you take to be known,
but does that not give you just Norton's view decorated with some metaphysical
musings?

I realize that Brown's version may be too subtle to even be summarized in an
article such as this, and if someone knows of a link to a fair outline of
Brown's views, I would give it a go.

As an aside, I am also amused to see 'real' in quotes (and it is not for the
reason I just put it there). It puts me in mind of George Burns' joke about
faking sincerity.

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mad44
If you are interested in thought experiments, this book does a great job of
providing you "tools for thinking". The book is called intuition pumps and
other tools for thinking by Daniel Dennett.

[https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-
Thinking/...](https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-
Thinking/dp/1491518871)

~~~
opaqe
This was my immediate idea for a comment as well. His "Darwin's Dangerous
Idea" book also has an extended discussion on the "Library of Mendel" which I
forgot if he included in intuition pumps. But from a programming languages
perspective I think the discussion of navigating "design space" in a
generalized way is a very powerful abstraction.

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mannykannot
Perhaps I am missing something, but the example given here seems to have been
loaded up with more insight than it can bear - it can refute "heavier things
fall faster" but not conclude that all things' acceleration under gravity
alone is independent of their mass (the article itself says "two objects of
different weight must fall at the same speed" which is simply false.)

To reach the equal acceleration conclusion by way of this thought experiment,
I think you have to have a quantitative and fairly comprehensive theory of
drag, and a supercomputer on which to do the calculations. Of course, one
alternative is to posit that drag is caused by movement through the
surrounding fluid and then, without elaborating on that, perform an experiment
- a real experiment - in a vacuum.

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matt4077
The major misconception I always had was that thought experiments were tools
for teaching, i. e. cute little metaphors to make special relativity
accessible to 16-year olds.

The reality (on the macro scale :) was apparently that especially Einstein
strongly relied on them to allow him to use project intuition into these
rather strange realms he was working on.

(The book I got this from added something like "because his math skills were
relatively shallow", but people always misunderstand that because they don't
see the unspoken context "... among physicists winning two or more Nobels")

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mwexler
Gedanken!
[https://www.britannica.com/science/Gedankenexperiment](https://www.britannica.com/science/Gedankenexperiment)
I love this word and it's associated meanings. Einstein is it's most famous
practitioner, but I find it's a useful way to play out situations to see
possible outcomes.

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dTal
I think of thought experiments as consistency audits on a mental framework -
they can't tell you anything new about the world directly, but they can reveal
problems in the way you've broken the problem down.

