Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
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Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
- Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
Philosophy and thought-experiments have some uses and are the appropriate methodology to try to answer or resolve certain questions and problems. For others a different methodology, namely the hands-on experimentation of science, is more appropriate. You mention the philosophical method over-simplifies things. Indeed, that's a crucial aspect of figuring out which method you need. If you need very specific, detailed results for practical purposes, then you need a hands-on approach like science. Philosophy on the other hand would help in a situation where you are looking for a principle so fundamental it is out of the scope of science, or trying to answer a general question.
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."
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- Sy Borg
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
Sure, we could just say it. However, I agree with Kurt Vonnegut that it's hard enough for people to look at these little black marks and create words, sounds and meanings from them in our heads. Why make it more difficult than it need to be? A little colour and metaphor can be enlivening as opposed to just slogging through tracts of cold observation couched in relatively formal terms.
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
It seems to me that what you're describing here, and calling "thought experiments", is really the more general concept of a "model" - a simplified version of selected aspects of reality. We use models all the time, in every aspect of our lives, in order to make the predictions on which our lives depend about the way the world will react to our actions. They're used in a more formal sense in science but it's basically the same thing. This method of attempting to describe and predict the world is called Reductionism.
Reductionism certainly has its critics and its limitations, but can you think of any way to eliminate it? Do you not think that its evident utility has to be weighed, as a trade-off, against the limits to its accuracy?
The only way to entirely eliminate it would be to take a completely holistic approach: to consider the exact state of the entire universe, with 100% accuracy, whenever we consider the behaviour of any one part of it. This would be logically impossible in any conceivable type of universe (i.e. regardless of any considerations about fundamental physical limits to the accuracy of measurements). So I put it to you that at least some form of simplification/model-making/thought-experimentation is unavoidable for any decision-making being who wants to understand the world at least enough to survive in it.
- Ben Saint-Clair
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
Daniel Dennett talks at length about how thought experiments are unsatisfactory in reasoning, in fact, he gets very agitated by some uses of them - for example in the case of Frank Jackson's knowledge argument he ripostes in his essay 'What Robo Mary Knows' in a very sarcastic way to a famous thought experiment.Nemisisx wrote:I noticed that most (perhaps all) philosophers use "thought experiments'" to prove or demonstrate either the logic or fallacy of a proposition or perhaps merely as examples of a possible situation. The use of a imaginary situation itself, as proof seems invalid ( in many cases) to me. The reason is in an imaginary situation, the situation is over simplified, by that I mean not all factors can be taken into account, a room in reality for instance viewed by an observer has numerous qualities and variables that could not be fully accounted for (reasonably), by projection in mind. So what tends to happen is proposals are validated in imagination ( because that may be the only means possible) but there is an inherent possible falsity in this method. Do you know any works that address this in philosophy, it may well have been overturned?
Immanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' argues that antinomies occur (that is situation like the case where space is either finite or infinite but the argument for both equally fails) because our reasoning and our understanding argue for separate cases since our reasoning becomes detached from our understanding. He argues that our minds are asked to work on a problem in a similar way to how a bird would be asked to fly without any air - impossible. In this case thought experiments fail because of our own limitations in understanding the noumenon - which can only be understood as a thing in itself stripped from all sensory data. It is the thing before it is processed by our minds and filtered through our senses. Kant states we should instead focus on learning about the phenomenon, which are the concepts that we deal with everyday. So in this case thought experiments fail due to the limitations of human reasoning and understanding.
Philosophers, according to Rorty, try to make a mirror of nature. The problem here is that philosophers constantly swing between dogmatism and skepticism because they project from the conditioned and relative to the unconditioned and absolute. This in essence is also an attack on the use of thought experiments and false analogies.
In fact, you can even argue that Wittgenstein, who limited all of philosophy to the philosophy of language, saw that there were limitations placed upon us by the concepts we used, from which we can infer that any thought experiments conducted with an inadequate set of concepts would lead to incorrect, ambiguous and false conclusions.
Anyway, I expect that will be enough to get you going...
- Sy Borg
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
Steve3007 wrote:The only way to entirely eliminate it would be to take a completely holistic approach: to consider the exact state of the entire universe, with 100% accuracy, whenever we consider the behaviour of any one part of it. This would be logically impossible ...
There would appear to be a pragmatism v idealism schism between these two statements. To my mind, Kant was just presenting the ideal case. Approximations are not failures in contexts where approximations are useful. For example, GR is an approximation because it breaks down at very small scales, yet the approximation obviously has myriad uses.Ben Saint-Clair wrote:Immanuel Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' argues that antinomies occur (that is situation like the case where space is either finite or infinite but the argument for both equally fails) because our reasoning and our understanding argue for separate cases since our reasoning becomes detached from our understanding.
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
- Atreyu
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
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Re: Loopholes in the use of thought expriments
But the word can also be used in a more general sense to refer to any activity which involves following through a process, mental or physical, where it is not immediately obvious at the outset what the conclusion is going to be; an iterative process; a process with stages that takes finite time to complete.
A good example would be the use of computer simulations to model physics. Clearly such simulations are pure theory - they are not "experiments" in the narrow sense that I described above, even if such things as fancy graphics can sometimes give the appearance that they are. They simply illustrate the logical consequences that would follow if various mathematical equations were accurate descriptions of physical reality. But, even though this makes their outcome entirely pre-determined, the enormous complexity of predicting that outcome in advance means that interesting and unexpected results can still emerge from them. So, in the wider sense of the word, I would most definitely class them as "experiments".
I would also, incidentally, conclude that the very concept of "pre-determination" is not quite as simple as we often think it is. But that's another topic.
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