Philosophical Thought Experiments

Over the past thirty years the philosophical vocabulary has consolidated the use of a new expression: “thought experiment”. What is a thought experiment? Although there is no completely unanimous answer to this question, almost all authors involved in the debate on thought experiments agree that to perform a thought experiment is to reason about an imaginary scenario with the aim of confirming or disconfirming some hypotheses or a theory. Thought experiments are epistemic tools indispensable for philosophy, as such have generated a lot of philosophical interest. The aim of the workshop is to address some of the questions arisen from the debate which are still open. What is the primary function of a philosophical thought experiment? What kind of knowledge do thought experiments produce, if any? More specifically, can thought experiments produce a priori knowledge? Is there any role left for thought experiments within philosophical methodology once we let go of the currently widespread opinion that philosophy is mainly concerned with truths that are both necessary and a priori? What is the role played by our imagination in philosophical thought experimentation? How do the recent empirically and theoretically based forms of skepticism about the use of intuitions in philosophical inquiry contribute to our understanding of the “power and limits” of thought experiments?

Organizers

Adriano Angelucci (University of Urbino) & Margherita Arcangeli (Institut Jean-Nicod)

Sponsors

Programme

Monday 9^th June

9:00 – 9:30 Introduction by Adriano Angelucci (University of Urbino) & Margherita Arcangeli (Institut Jean Nicod)

9:30 – 10:20 Achille Varzi (Columbia University): Thought Experiments, Possibility, and Paradoxes

10:20 – 10:50 Coffee Break

10:50 – 11:40 Vittorio Morato (University of Padova): Conceivability and Counterfactual Thinking

11:40 – 12:30 Margot Strohminger (University of St Andrews): Modal Knowledge by Imaginings, not Intuitions

12.30 - 14.30 Lunch Break

14:30 – 15:20 Daniel Dohrn (Humboldt-Universität of Berlin): Fancy

15:20 – 16:10 Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College): The Role of Imagination in Thought Experiments

16:10 – 16:40 Coffee Break

16:40 – 17:30 Sören Häggqvist (Stockholm University): Judgements and Disagreement in Thought Experiments

17:30 – 18:20 Daniele Sgaravatti (University of St Andrews): Thought Experiments, Concepts and Conceptions

Tuesday 10^th June

9:00 – 9:50 Elke Brendel (University of Bonn): Experimental Philosophy and Thought Experiments aboutKnowledge

9:50 – 10:20 Coffee Break

10:20 – 11:10 Florian Cova (Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva): Experts, Intuitions, and Thought Experiments. What is Different about Philosophical Thought Experiments?

11:10 – 12:00 Daniel Cohnitz (University of Tartu): Thought Experiments and the (Ir)relevance of Intuitions in Philosophy

12.00 - 14.00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 14:50 Julia Langkau (Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz): The Role of Intuitions in Philosophy

14:50 – 15:40 Sophie Roux (École Normale Supérieure of Paris): TBA

15:40 – 16:10 Coffee Break

16:10 – 17:00 Roy Sorensen (Washington University in St. Louis): Smartfounding: Four Grades of Resistance to Thought Experiment

Abstracts

Elke Brendel (University of Bonn): Experimental Philosophy and Thought Experiments about Knowledge

The talk begins with some general considerations on the nature and role of thought experiments in epistemology. I will then examine some prominent epistemic thought experiments– as, for example, the famous Gettier cases and thought experiments in the debate about epistemic contextualism and subject sensitive invariantism–and discuss their purported efficiency in supporting theories of knowledge. Recent experimental studies seem to show that there is a significant difference in the intuitive evaluation of epistemic thought experiments between philosophical “experts” and non-philosophers. In particular, these studies seem to provide evidence for arguing that folk attributions of “know” are not in accordance with the predictions of contextualist or subject sensitive invariantist accounts. Furthermore, epistemic folk intuitions about the Gettier cases and similar thought experiments seem to be inter- and intrapersonal instable and appear to show some cultural variability. Therefore, some experimental philosophers have claimed that the use of thought experiments in analyzing the notion of knowledge is fundamentally misguided. The aim of my talk is to cast doubt on these alleged experimental findings and try to defend the use of thought experiments and an intuition-based methodology in epistemology.

Daniel Cohnitz (University of Tartu): Thought Experiments and the (Ir)relevance of Intuitions in Philosophy

Many contemporary meta-philosophers assume that analytic philosophy has a methodology that is shared across all, or most, of its sub-disciplines: the so-called "method of cases." Crucially, the method is supposed to involve appeals to intuition. In my talk I argue that this assumption is mistaken. First of all, there isn't one method of cases, but many, each serving a different function in philosophy. One of these functions is the use of thought experiments as counterexamples. This seems to be the target of much of the meta-philosophical discussion. However, even this method doesn't seem to involve intuition in the way contemporary meta-philosophers have claimed.

Florian Cova (Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva): Experts, Intuitions, and Thought Experiments. What is Different about Philosophical Thought Experiments?

Reliance on intuitions triggered by thought experiments is a widespread methodology in philosophy (and more particularly in certain areas of philosophy such as epistemology or ethics). However, the reliability of these intuitions has been recently challenged on empirical grounds. Indeed, “experimental philosophers” purport to have empirically demonstrated that intuitions triggered by philosophical thought experiments are sensible to many philosophically irrelevant factors, such as demographic origins or personality traits. Some have opposed this conclusion on the basis that most of these experiments have involved naive participants, and that the intuition of naive participants are irrelevant to the philosophical debate. However, this defence – that has been dubbed the “expertise defence” – has the burden of explaining why naive intuitions should be considered irrelevant. A particular version of the expertise defence has thus relied on the fact that philosophical intuitions are intuitions about thought experiments, and that naive intuitions about thought experiments are irrelevant in other fields such as physics or history. However, this version supposes that philosophical thought experiments and scientific thought experiment work the same way and involve the same kind of skills and expertise. In this paper, I differentiate different kinds of thought experiments on the basis of the skills and expertise they require and argue that a certain kind of experiments – the “intuition pumps” – are peculiar to philosophy and cannot be adequately compared to the kind of scientific experiments tenants of the expertise defence have in mind. I thus conclude that the experimental challenge to philosophical intuitions cannot be answered by drawing an analogy between philosophical and scientific thought experiments. However, because all philosophical thought experiments are not intuition pumps, I also argue that experimental philosophy is irrelevant for a certain range of philosophical thought experiments.

Daniel Dohrn (Humboldt-Universität of Berlin): Fancy

Saul Kripke, following Hume, describes modal reasoning as an imaginative exercise. He seems to treat conceiving and imagining roughly synonymous. This is far from trivial, however, as can already be seen when looking into the history of the conceivability-possibility link. Not all philosophers endorsing such a link would subscribe to the synonymy of conceiving and imagining. Descartes is a counterexample. This raises the question how informative talk of imagining is, or to put it otherwise: what genuine role the imagination could play in acquiring modal knowledge and tackling thought experimental scenarios. Drawing on Stephen Yablo and Timothy Williamson, I argue that an imaginative simulation, conceived holistically as recruiting all our cognitive capacities and all our empirical knowledge, plays a special role in providing an appearance of possibility or impossibility. Then I discuss some challenges to this proposal: how detailed a simulation do we need? Can imagination, unlike many pieces of fiction, be sensitive to modal constraints? Is there a circularity involved in determining these constraints? How is the simulation grounded in empirical knowledge? How does it embed under suppositions?

Sören Häggqvist (Stockholm University): Judgements and Disagreement in Thought Experiments

Thought experiments aimed at refuting some theoretical claim – negative thought experiments – depend on intuitive judgements concerning hypothetical cases. What is the content (or form) of such judgements? Recent proposals (Williamson 2005, 2007; Ichikawa & Jarvis 2009; Malmgren 2011) have focussed on Gettier judgements, while attempting to achieve some generality. I shall argue that (i) the aims of generality and faithfulness to Gettier cases are in some tension, because (ii) Gettier cases are less representative of philosophical thought experiments than is often assumed; and that (iii) the mentioned proposals fail to adequately represent the distinctness of three different ways of disagreeing with the intended conclusion. Finally, I shall argue the advantages of an alternative proposal concerning the form (rather than content) of many negative thought experiments.

Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College): The Role of Imagination in Thought Experiments

In this paper, I argue that imagining – understood as a mental activity that is importantly distinct from conceiving – has an indispensable role to play in the consideration of thought experiments. Although imagining is often invoked in discussion of thought experiments, it is usually done so in such a way that it is not distinguished from conceiving; the suggestion that we imagine the proposed scenarios is usually not taken to be too importantly different from the suggestion that we conceive the proposed scenarios. This is in large part because the success of thought experiments seems to turn on whether they provide us with insight into what possible; since it’s not clear that imagining in its own right can do this, it’s assumed that the consideration of thought experiments must proceed by way of conceiving. The defender of imagination thus seems to face a dilemma: she can treat imagining as a proprietary mental activity distinct from conceiving, or she can treat imagining as a mental activity that plays a key role in the consideration of thought experiments, but she can’t do both.

In my view, however, this is a false dilemma. As I show in this paper, the defender of imagination can indeed have it both ways. My argument proceeds in two stages. I start by laying out how imagining can be differentiated from the related mental activity of conceiving. This results in an imagery-based account of imagining. In the second (and longer) stage of the paper, I argue that imagistic imagining proves useful in the consideration of thought experiments; in particular, I argue that it can do the epistemic work needed to justify beliefs about what’s possible. Distinguishing imagining from conceiving does not deprive imagination of a role in thought experiments but, to the contrary, it’s only once we distinguish imagining from conceiving that we are able to see clearly its epistemic import.

Julia Langkau (Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz): The Role of Intuitions in Philosophy

The practice of appealing to intuitions as evidence has recently been criticised by experimental philosophers. While some traditional philosophers defend intuitions as a trustworthy source of evidence, others try to sidestep or undermine the challenge this criticism poses to philosophical methodology. I argue that some recent attempts to undermine the challenge from experimental philosophy fail. I conclude that whether intuitions play a role in philosophy cannot be decided by analysing our use of the word ‘intuition’ or related terms, and what philosophers rely on may not be manifest on the surface of what they write. The question what intuitions are and what their role is in philosophy has to be settled within the wider framework of a theory of knowledge, justification, and philosophical methodology.

Vittorio Morato (University of Padova): Conceivability and Counterfactual Thinking

According to T. Williamson (2008), the epistemology of metaphysical modality is just a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking. A revealing sign of this connection is the definability of modal operators in terms of counterfactual conditionals. A plausible way to explain how the logical definability could explain the connection between modal knowledge and counterfactual knowledge is to claim that counterfactual and modal knowledge have a common source, namely our capacity of developing a counterfactual supposition (Kroedel 2012). The main aim of my talk will be that of clarify this notion, to distinguish the development of a counterfactual supposition from the development of a non-counterfactual supposition and to clarify its relation with the notion of conceivability. I will then evaluate the idea that developing a counterfactual supposition A is to determine what are the metaphysical entailments of A.

Sophie Roux (Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris): TBA

Daniele Sgaravatti (University of St Andrews): Thought Experiments, Concepts and Conceptions

The paper aims to offer an account of the cognitive capacities involved in judgements about thought experiments, without appealing to the notions of analyticity or intuition. I suggest that we employ a competence in the application of the relevant concepts. In order to address the worry that this suggestion is not explanatory, I look at some theories of concepts discussed in psychology, and I use them to illustrate how such competence might be realized. I end by considering a possible objection and comparing my account with a similar one defended by David Papineau.

Roy Sorensen (Washington University in St. Louis): Smartfounding: Four Grades of Resistance to Thought Experiment

As a cadet at West Point, George Derby (1823-1861) enrolled in a class on military strategy: “A thousand men are besieging a fortress that contains these quantities of equipment and provisions,” said the instructor, displaying a chart. “It is a military axiom that at the end of 45 days the fort will surrender. If you were in command of this fortress, what would you do?”. Derby raised his hand, “I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of 45 days I would change places with him.” This is an instance of smartfounding – circumventing the intent of a thought experiment by expert over-compliance.

Smartfounding is the opposite of the “moral dumbfounding” discussed by Jonathan Haidt in his research on disgust. Dumbfounders have general competence at thought experiment (in contrast to people who lack formal education). However, they are flustered by thought experiments that support repugnant conclusions. They commit performance errors, often seeming to regress to the answers of the unschooled.

Smartfounders retain their composure. They offer the most sophisticated grade of resistance to thought experiment. Whereas the lower grades of resistance are merely fallacious, smartfounding often constitutes a penetrating internal critique of the thought experiment – and sometime of thought experiment in general.

Margot Strohminger (University of St Andrews): Modal Knowledge by Imaginings, not Intuitions

Call the view that certain imaginings are a source of evidence for claims about (metaphysical) modality modal imaginism. This paper revisits an objection to modal imaginism. According to it, even when the modal imaginist’s imaginings precede the acquisition of knowledge of modality, they are not what is responsible for that acquisition; rather, intuitions are. This talk develops the objection to modal imaginism in greater detail and then shows how the modal imaginist has the resources to respond.

Achille Varzi (Columbia University): Thought Experiments, Possibility, and Paradoxes

Thought experiments serve many purposes. Most notably, they often function as necessity refuters; they describe a possible scenario that falsifies a certain philosophical thesis, thereby showing that the thesis in question is, if true, contingently so. In some cases, however, a thought experiment may also function as a possibility refuter: if successful, it shows that a certain set of philosophical theses or beliefs saddles us with inconsistency, with the consequence that something must give. One might be inclined to describe these two purposes as in some sense opposite in spirit: necessity refuters target the “narrow mindedness” of certain theses; possibility refuters the “open mindedness” of others. In fact, both are species of the same genus. Both aim at showing that the modal space has a different structure than one might think. And both do so by pushing our sense of possibility, by showing that if something is possible, something else must be possible, too. One aim of this paper is to clarify this point. The other aim is to illustrate its consequences vis-à-vis the standard characterization of the paradoxes in terms of (failed) compossibility.

This event is free to attend and no registration is required.

How to reach Urbino, Piazza della Repubblica

Further informations: adrian.angelucci@gmail.com, margheritarcangeli@gmail.com