Organon F

Volume 31, February 2024, Issue 1, Pages 2–21

ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)

What is the role of thought experiments in scientific exploration? Can they provide us with new knowledge about the world? In a recent article, Lorenzo Sartori argues that thought experiments function like ordinary (material) experiments: Both material experiments and thought experiments are made in a specific context, which must then be extrapolated and generalized to say something true about the world. This article discusses and criticizes Sartori’s proposal. It suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding thought experiments, their argumentative role, and how they provide new knowledge about the world. The framework presented is a coherentist framework, where coherence has three aspects: consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness. The proposal is that the argumentative role of thought experiments is to demonstrate the presence or absence of consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness, thereby strengthening a theory, weakening a theory, or showing one theory to be better than another. This is the way thought experiments provides new knowledge about the world, since the way we learn something new about the world is by discovering which theories about the world are most coherent.

Coherence theory; Lorenzo Sartori; scientific epistemology; thought experiments.

Author

Michael Agerbo Mørch

Affiliation

Fjellhaug International University College

Address

Leifsgade 33.6, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark

E-mail

mam@dbi.edu 

Author

Atle Ottesen Søvik

Affiliation

Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society

Address

MF Norwegian School of Theology, P.O. Box 5144 Majorstua, 0302 Oslo, Norway

E-mail

Atle.O.Sovik@mf.no 

Received

10 October 2023

Revised

10 November 2023

Accepted

13 November 2023

Publishers

Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences

Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

APA

Mørch, M.A., Søvik, A.O. (2024). A Systematic Account of the Argumentative Role of Thought Experiments. Organon F, 31(1), 2–21. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31101

Chicago

Mørch, Michael Agerbo, Atle Ottesen Søvik. 2024. "A Systematic Account of the Argumentative Role of Thought Experiments." Organon F 31 (1): 2–21. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31101

Harvard

Mørch, M.A., Søvik, A.O. (2024). A Systematic Account of the Argumentative Role of Thought Experiments. Organon F, 31(1), pp. 2–21. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2024.31101

© Michael Agerbo Mørch and Atle Ottesen Søvik

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