Our conception of thought experiment may be summarized as follows. Let us suppose that we want to know what is entailed by the occurrence of a given state of affairs αk. Let us call the state of affairs entailed by it ‘βk’. If αk is «ready», it is sufficient to conduct respective observation: thanks to it we shall «see» βk. Otherwise, we have to bring out the occurrence of αk. This is what real experiment consists in. We have called αk “the basis of experiment”, and we call βk — “the result of experiment”. If establishing that the occurrence of αk entails the occurrence of βk is the first step to put the hypothesis — let us call it ‘γ’ — stating that the occurrence of the phenomenon α entails the occurrence of the phenomenon β, the experiment is heuristic (α is here a type of states of affairs exemplified by αk, and β — is a type of states of affairs exemplified by βk). Other experiments are of testing character. If we already had put γ, then establishing that the occurrence of αk e...
