“…This is evidenced by the large number of characterizations of thought experiments that have piled up. Thought experiments are arguments (Norton 1991(Norton , 1996(Norton , 2004a(Norton , 2004b, windows into Plato's heaven (Brown 1986(Brown , 1991(Brown , 2004, intuition pumps (Dennett 1984(Dennett , 2013, experiments (Gooding 1992a(Gooding , 1992bSorensen 1992;Stuart 2016b), manipulations of mental models (Gendler 2004;Miščević 1992Miščević , 2007Nersessian 1992Nersessian , 1993Nersessian , 2007Nersessian , 2008Nersessian , 2018, examples (Elgin 2014;Ierodiakonou 2018), "props" for the imagination (Meynell 2014(Meynell , 2018; Salis and Frigg forthcoming), invitations to imagine (Becker 2018), fictions (Elgin 2014), tests of a theory's potential (Bokulich 2001;Lennox 1991), rhetorical devices (Lennox 1991), and many other things.…”