Abstract
Brown (The laboratory of the mind. Thought experiments in the natural science, 1991a, 1991b; Contemporary debates in philosophy of science, 2004; Thought experiments, 2008) argues that thought experiments (TE) in science cannot be arguments and cannot even be represented by arguments. He rest his case on examples of TEs which proceed through a contradiction to reach a positive resolution (Brown calls such TEs “platonic”). This, supposedly, makes it impossible to represent them as arguments for logical reasons: there is no logic that can adequately model such phenomena. (Brown further argues that this being the case, “platonic” TEs provide us with irreducible insight into the abstract realm of laws of nature). I argue against this approach by describing how “platonic” TEs can be modeled within the logical framework of adaptive proofs for prioritized consequence operations. To show how this mundane apparatus works, I use it to reconstruct one of the key examples used by Brown, Galileo’s TE involving falling bodies.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Christian Strasser, Frederik Van De Putte, Erik Weber, Rawad Skaff, Dagmar Provijn and Joke Meheus for reading and discussing with me earlier versions of this manuscript. I also owe gratitude to all the people who discussed this topic with me: Graham Priest, Diderik Batens, Anouk Barberousse, Peter Simons, Margherita Arcangeli, Gillman Payette, and the audiences in Geneva, Paris and Ghent, where I gave talks based on this material. I also would like to thank two anonymous referees whose comments were invaluable.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Urbaniak, R. “Platonic” thought experiments: how on earth?. Synthese 187, 731–752 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0008-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-011-0008-4