Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia
Linguistics & Philosophy IUSS Center
IUSS Philosophy Seminars
eMath Project
Epistemology of Mathematics and Logic
“HOW TO USE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS”
July 7th 2021, 16.00
Speaker:
- Elijah Chudnoff - University of Miami
Abstract:
Thought experiments result in judgments that are passed on to further philosophical reasoning. What are these judgments? What basis do we have for making them? What is the point of making them? Let’s say that a conception of thought experiments includes answers to these three questions. My thesis is that philosophers should use thought experiments in accordance with a conception of them organized around the idea of explanation. This will take some spelling out, but in brief: thought experiment judgments are judgments about possible explanations, based on impressions shaped by explanatory content distributed between intuitive theories and deliberate cognition, and used to test the explanatory ambitions of publicly debated theories. My case for endorsing this conception rests on the fruitfulness of the interventions in current debates about the content, basis, and point of thought experiment judgments that it suggests.
Use the following link to attend:
https://iusspavia.zoom.us/j/99529506550
Info: andrea.sereni@iusspavia.it – luca.zanetti@iusspavia.it