Thought experiments outside science

Dueling Theories: Thought Experiments in Cognitive Science

Brook (1999) identified thought experiments as one of the key elements of philosophy's contribution to the cognitive sciences. In this paper, I tackle the question of how and why thought experiments work, and what exactly it is they do for us when they do work. I propose that thought experiments almost always involve two different theories of the world being compared to show that they do, or mo...

The Role of Thought Experiments in Science and Science Learning

This chapter will (1) briefly review selected studies examining the nature of thought experiments in science; (2) review previous studies on the role that thought experiments can play in science instruction; (3) give case study examples of thought experiments (TEs) proposed by both teachers and students and the ensuing classroom discussions. We discuss several definitions for the term thought e...

Holographic Thought Experiments

The Hamiltonian of classical anti-de Sitter gravity is a pure boundary term on-shell. If this remains true in non-perturbative quantum gravity then i) boundary observables will evolve unitarily in time and ii) the algebra of boundary observables is the same at all times. In particular, information available at the boundary at any one time t1 remains available at any other time t2. Since there i...

On Possibilities and Thought Experiments∗

This paper concerns two related recent books by Nicholas Rescher, Imagining Irreality on possibilities and What If? on thought experiments—see [23] and [24]. The books are related because a theory on thought experiments presupposes a theory on possibilities. The effect of this and of the fact that they have a wider range of application than thought experiments will be that possibilities will re...

Student Resistance to Thought-Experiments