thought experiment

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thought experiment

[′thȯt ik′sper·ə·mənt]
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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The alternative I have proposed has been this: by focusing on imaginary scenarios and making reference to particulars, thought experiments can provide a fulcrum for the reorganization of conceptual commitments; this explains the way in which they can provide us with novel information without empirical input.
Let me mention one final reservation which concerns the thought experiments themselves.
Sorensen reviews and responds to some arguments for doubting that thought experiments can yield information about the external world: the suggestions that they are nothing more than acts of introspection or appeals to ordinary language usage.
The early history of philosophical thought experiments remains largely unwritten.
'Two Thought Experiments Reviewed' (Chapter 6), is a short essay in which Burge addresses Jerry Fodor's criticisms of his thought experiments and reaffirms that the thought experiments are not about meaning but rather about propositional attitudes.
Each is a system whose logic we can hold in our heads, thereby enabling thought experiments. Applying the resulting clarity of insight to the examination of other cas leads to better understandings of each and of the relationships among them.
Thought experiments (hereafter TEs) are transparent, persuasive, and are accessible in a way that few real experiments (hereafter REs) are.
That the natures of many of one's thoughts depend on social relations one bears to language users is an idea that Burge has developed in articles since "Individualism and the Mental" (1979).(3) However, that paper contains his main argument for that thesis, an argument resting on his thought experiments involving conceptual error (about arthritis, brisket, etc.) on the part of the thinker.
Using plain language and a conversational tone with a sense of humor, this work for students provides thought experiments and exercises to illustrate mathematics as a set of ideas for representing, using, and communicating numerical information.
In particular, he rejects thought experiments, which he regards as "the worst and irreducibly most slack way of pursuing philosophical knowledge." Instead, he prefers a richer, more contextual approach that takes into consideration cultural and social factors.
Pedagogical features include leadership quality self-assessments and individual and group exercises, simulations, thought experiments, and role plays.
"Quantum physics textbooks are illustrated by thought experiments," Haroche says.