Dec 22, 2017 03:32 AM
https://aeon.co/essays/do-thought-experi...fic-truths
EXCERPT: . . . Today, most scientists and philosophers believe that there is only one reliable way to learn about the world, namely, to poke and prod at it – the view that philosophers call empiricism. [...] But as Galileo has shown, there seem to be exceptions to this rule. [...] Thought experiments, as they’re known, are an exercise of pure imagination. We think about some particular arrangement of things in the world, and then work out what the consequences would be. In doing so, we seem to learn something about the laws of nature. Thought experiments have played a crucial role in the history of physics. Galileo was the first great master of the thought experiment; Albert Einstein was another. [...]
If [philosopher James Robert] Brown is right – if Galileo successfully thought his way through to understanding something profound about the natural world – then it is important to know how, exactly, he pulled it off. Brown’s view is that thought experiments allow us to glimpse ‘universals’; that is, they let us discern universal truths about the natural world. In much the same way that we arrive at mathematical truths (by thinking about them), we can also arrive at certain truths about nature.
In other words, although the world is full of physical stuff, occupying space and persisting over time, some truths about the physical world have a very un-physical flavour. They resemble mathematical truths, seeming to exist outside of space and time. These truths, Brown believes, can be intuited a priori, without the need for observation or experiment. It’s an idea that goes back to Plato, and indeed Brown cheerfully describes himself as a Platonist.
For several decades now, John Norton, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh, has defended the empiricist camp against Brown’s Platonism. Norton believes that thought experiments, far from offering a glimpse into a realm of Platonic truths, are simply elegantly crafted arguments that bring vivid pictures to the mind’s eye. They do not produce new knowledge, he says, other than what one might deduce from analysing the knowledge already implicitly contained in the argument’s own premises. Thought experiments, as he wrote in a paper in 1996, ‘open no new channels of access to the physical world’. Consider again the Galileo case....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/do-thought-experi...fic-truths
EXCERPT: . . . Today, most scientists and philosophers believe that there is only one reliable way to learn about the world, namely, to poke and prod at it – the view that philosophers call empiricism. [...] But as Galileo has shown, there seem to be exceptions to this rule. [...] Thought experiments, as they’re known, are an exercise of pure imagination. We think about some particular arrangement of things in the world, and then work out what the consequences would be. In doing so, we seem to learn something about the laws of nature. Thought experiments have played a crucial role in the history of physics. Galileo was the first great master of the thought experiment; Albert Einstein was another. [...]
If [philosopher James Robert] Brown is right – if Galileo successfully thought his way through to understanding something profound about the natural world – then it is important to know how, exactly, he pulled it off. Brown’s view is that thought experiments allow us to glimpse ‘universals’; that is, they let us discern universal truths about the natural world. In much the same way that we arrive at mathematical truths (by thinking about them), we can also arrive at certain truths about nature.
In other words, although the world is full of physical stuff, occupying space and persisting over time, some truths about the physical world have a very un-physical flavour. They resemble mathematical truths, seeming to exist outside of space and time. These truths, Brown believes, can be intuited a priori, without the need for observation or experiment. It’s an idea that goes back to Plato, and indeed Brown cheerfully describes himself as a Platonist.
For several decades now, John Norton, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh, has defended the empiricist camp against Brown’s Platonism. Norton believes that thought experiments, far from offering a glimpse into a realm of Platonic truths, are simply elegantly crafted arguments that bring vivid pictures to the mind’s eye. They do not produce new knowledge, he says, other than what one might deduce from analysing the knowledge already implicitly contained in the argument’s own premises. Thought experiments, as he wrote in a paper in 1996, ‘open no new channels of access to the physical world’. Consider again the Galileo case....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/do-thought-experi...fic-truths