In a paper entitled Thought Experimentation of Presocratic Philosophy, Nicholas Rescher writes:
Homo sapiens is an amphibian who can live and function in two very different realms — the domain of actual facts which we can investigate in observational inquiry, and the domain of the imaginative projection which we can explore in thought through reasoning….
A thought experiment is an attempt to draw instruction from a process of hypothetical reasoning that proceeding by eliciting the consequences of a hypothesis which, for anything that one actually knows to the contrary, may be false.
It consists in reasoning from a supposition that is not accepted as true- perhaps even known to be false but is assumed provisionally in the interests of making a point or resolving a conclusion.
More Thought Experiment reading here.
No comments:
Post a Comment