Differences between Common Types of Thought Experiments and their Consequences for Philosophical Methodology

Abstract

It is a common assumption that philosophical thought experiments are structurally identical. Contrary to this assumption, I show that at least two types of thought experiments exist. Descartes’s “piece of wax” and Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” thought experiments, for instance, are performative proofs that consist in exercising the imagination to justify a claim about the imagination. Searle’s “Chinese room” and Davidson’s “swampman” thought experiments, for example, evaluate theories by comparing whether two entities, of which one is a mundane entity and the other constructed according to ontological assumptions entailed by the tested theory, are identical. I further differentiate these two types of thought experiments from the method of cases, compare them to other thought experiment types, such as Chalmers’s “zombie” case, and evaluate whether they are continuous with scientific thought experiments, as is commonly claimed.