scholarly journals Rational Reasons, Counterfactual Statements and “Impossible Worlds” in the Philosophical Justifications of Thought Experiments

2022 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
V. N. Karpovich
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Classical Negation ◽  
The World

In his theory of natural laws David Lewis rejects the authenticity of impossible worlds on the grounds that the contradiction contained within his modifier "in (the world) w" is tantamount to a contradiction in the whole theory, which seems unacceptable. At the same time, in philosophical discourse very often researchers use counterfactual situations and thought experiments with impossible events and objects. There is a need to apply the theory of worlds to genuine, concrete, but impossible worlds. One way to do this is to reject Lewis's classical negation on the grounds that it leads to problems of completeness and inconsistency inside the worlds. The proposed extension for impossibility is compatible with Lewis's extensional metaphysics, although it leads to some loss for description completeness in semantics.

scholarly journals NESATYS KAIP REDUKTYVISTINĖS PRIEŽASTINGUMO ANALIZĖS ARGUMENTAS

Problemos ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 104-114
Author(s):  
Vytautas Grenda
Keyword(s):  
David Lewis ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Humean Supervenience ◽  
The World ◽  
Supervenience Thesis

Straipsnis supažindina su argumentu už reduktyvistinę, hiumišką priežastingumo sampratą. Remiamasi Davido Lewiso ir Hugh’o Melloro įžvalga, kad negali egzistuoti priežastis ir jų padarinius siejantis santykis, nes priežastimis ar padariniais gali būti vadinami ne tik pozityvūs, bet ir negatyvūs faktai ar įvykiai (nesatys). Jeigu toks santykis neegzistuoja, tai prieš vadinamąją „hiumiškojo supervenavimo“ tezę nukreipti mintiniai eksperimentai negali įrodyti, jog priežastingumas yra neredukuojama pasaulio ypatybė. Daugiausia, ką jie gali įrodyti, – tai įprastinės priežastingumo sampratos prieštaringumą. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: priežastingumas, hiumizmas, nesatys.Absences as an Argument for Reductionist Analysis of CausationVytautas Grenda SummaryThe article advances an argument in favour of the reductionist, Humean conception of causation. The author draws upon an insight of David Lewis and Hugh Mellor: there can be no irreducible relation between causes and their effects, because not only the case that something exists, but also the case that something does not exist (i. e. absence) can be called a cause or an effect. If there’s no such a relation, then the thought experiments that are directed against the so-called “Humean supervenience” thesis cannot prove that causation is an irreducible feature of the world. The utmost such experiments can prove is that the ordinary conception of causation is inconsistent. Keywords: causation, humeanism, absences.ht: 115%; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> 

“There is no such thing as pure fiction”: Impossible worlds and the principle of minimal departure reconsidered

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Mikkonen
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Actual World ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Literary Devices

AbstractAs has been argued in various theories of fiction, there can be no such thing as a totally fictional world. This paper seeks to examine the principle of minimal departure, defined by David Lewis and Marie-Laure Ryan, as an explanation for the impossibility of total fiction that would undermine all assumptions based on our actual world. The principle says that readers reconstrue the fictional world as being the closest possible to the reality we know, unless otherwise indicated.By drawing examples from the ontologically fluid worlds in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, I suggest new areas in narrative analysis where the principle could be applied and point out some limitations in earlier definitions of this notion. On the one hand, we can examine those narrative and literary devices that directly play upon the principle of mimimal departure and allow fiction to enlarge the scope of the world that must be explained. On the other hand, I argue that questions of modality in fiction may be relatively immune to this principle. I thus introduce the rule of suspension of modal claims, indicating the need to refrain from making assumptions, in any strong sense, about what may be possible, necessary, or contingent in a fictional world. The principle of suspension of modal claims emphasizes the way fiction may encourage epistemological and ontological doubt rather than mimetic or antimimetic expectations (i.e. principles of minimal and maximal departure), compelling our judgement of the possibility and reality of fiction to hesitate, to linger over a range of possibilities.

scholarly journals Sound for Thought: Listening as Metabolism

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Vincenzo Butera
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The World ◽  
Affective Perception ◽  
History Of

The metaphor of metabolism, in its permeating and incorporative senses, can extend fruitfully beyond digestion. Here, I consider it as analogous to the phenomenological process of audition. Neither static nor disaffected in a state of abstract rationality, but necessarily implicated in the objects and contexts of listening, the auditor ingests, accepts, disseminates, and expulses sound. Through this, we might see the beginnings of a phenomenological vocabulary which is based in incorporative perceptual subjectivity (not universal aesthetics) and the inimitable character of audition (thus not primarily visualistic). Beyond the construction of an organic auditory phenomenology, the analogy of metabolism and audition suggests a reciprocal correspondence between the listening subject and the world within which sounds are manifested. Furthermore, these metaphors speak to a specific history of philosophical discourse concerning issues of temporal subjectivity, oral othering, and affective perception. 

Problems in Cognitive Media Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
Wyatt Moss-Wellington
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Ethics ◽  
The World ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach

This chapter surveys key problems emerging at the intersection of cognitive science and media ethics, and further refines a hermeneutic approach that will account for each dilemma. Problems discussed include the moral policing of fictive thought experiments rather than actions taken in the world, the confounding heteronomies of cultural and personality variation, issues of selfhood and determinism, and confusions between the ethical and the political. This chapter explains how each problem will be navigated over ensuing chapters, presenting a union of theories in autobiographical memory, social cognition, and textual hermeneutics as a model for unearthing the lived impact—and therefore the ethics—of narrative media and storytelling.

Can Children Benefit from Thought Experiments?

2019 ◽  
pp. 262-279
Author(s):  
Igor Bascandziev ◽  
Paul L. Harris
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The “child as scientist” metaphor has been a source of many important insights about how children learn about the world. Extensive research has shown that, like scientists, children construct and test theories about the world through observation, exploration, and experimentation. What is not known, however, is whether children are similar to scientists in their employment of thought experimentation and other rationalistic processes when trying to learn about the world. Although the history of science has documented many instances of thought experiments being central to conceptual revolutions, there have been no empirical studies that ask the same question within developmental psychology. Such empirical studies are needed and warranted. Contrary to popular belief, children’s imagination is not fanciful or poorly disciplined. Instead, their imagination is constrained by knowledge of causal principles across different domains. Thus, engaging children in thought experiments should not produce unrealistic or impossible outcomes; rather, it should produce outcomes consistent with the causal structure of the world. Indeed, the consideration of hitherto unacknowledged implications of such outcomes may teach children something new about the world. This chapter reviews evidence from several studies that were not originally designed to test whether children can benefit from thought experiments but which nonetheless provide encouraging preliminary evidence of such benefit. Somewhat surprisingly, they hint that at least under some circumstances, the benefit from thought experiments may be greater than the benefit from direct observations of the world.

Thought Experiments

Philosophy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Robert Brown ◽  
Michael T. Stuart
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
The World ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Insight Into

Thought experiments are performed in the imagination. We set up some situation, we observe what happens, then we try to draw appropriate conclusions. In this way, thought experiments resemble real experiments, except that they are experiments in the mind. The terms “thought experiment,” “imaginary experiment,” and “Gedankenexperiment” are used interchangeably. There is no consensus on a definition, but there is widespread agreement on which are standard examples. It is also widely agreed that they play a central role in a number of fields, especially physics and philosophy. There are several important questions about thought experiments that naturally arise, including what kinds of thought experiments there are, what roles they play, and how, if at all, they work. This last question has been the focus of much of the literature: How can we learn something new about the world just by thinking? Answers range from “We don’t really learn anything new” to “We have some sort of a priori insight into how nature works.” In between there are a great variety of rival alternative accounts. There is still no consensus; debate is wide open on almost every question pertaining to thought experiments.

The Puritan Cosmopolis

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Significant Relation ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

This book traces the emergence of a sense of kinship with and belonging to a larger, more inclusive world within the law and literature of late seventeenth-century Puritanism. Connected to this cosmopolitanism in part through travel, trade, and politics, late seventeenth-century Puritans, it is argued, were also thinking in terms that went beyond these parameters about what it meant to feel affiliated with people in remote places—of which the Ottoman Empire is the best, but not the only example—and to experience what Bruce Robbins calls “attachment at a distance.” In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as “stand[ing] in an ethically significant relation” to people all around the world. The underlying source of these cosmopolitan predilections was the law, specifically the law of nations, often considered the precursor to international law. Through the terms for sovereignty, obligation, and society made available by a turn toward the cosmopolitan within the law, the Puritans experimented with concepts of extended obligation and ideas about a society consisting of all humans, not just those living on certain trade routes or within certain foreign communities. In mapping out these thought experiments, The Puritan Cosmopolis uncovers Puritans who were reconceptualizing war, contemplating new ways of cultivating peace, and rewriting the rules for being Puritan by internalizing legal theories about living in a larger, more inclusive world.

Are Thought Experiments Just What You Thought?

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Norton
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Science Writing ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
The World

Whatever the original intent, the introduction of the term ‘thought experiment’ has proved to be one of the great public relations coups of science writing. For generations of readers of scientific literature, the term has planted the seed of hope that the fragment of text they have just read is more than mundane. Because it was a thought experiment, does it not tap into that infallible font of all wisdom in empiricist science, the experiment? And because it was conducted in thought, does it not miraculously escape the need for the elaborate laboratories and bloated budgets of experimental science?These questions in effect pose the epistemological problem of thought experiments in the sciences:Thought experiments are supposed to give us information about our physical world. From where can this information come?One enticing response to the problem is to imagine that thought experiments draw from some special source of knowledge of the world that transcends our ordinary epistemic resources.

Knowledge Of Meanings And Knowledge Of The World

Philosophy ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 39 (148) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panayot Butchvarov
Keyword(s):  
Hard Core ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Actual Use

One of the most characteristic (and certainly most original) claims of the dominant movement in contemporary British philosophy, to which we shall refer as the philosophy of ordinary language, is that traditional philosophical discourse has usually been logically improper because it has depended upon systematic misuses of certain expressions in ordinary language and that philosophy is a legitimate cognitive discipline only if it is concerned with the description of the actual use of language. To substantiate this claim, the philosopher of ordinary language has had to establish at least the following two general philosophical theses, which together seem to constitute the hard core of original doctrine in the philosophy of ordinary language. First, that the meaning of an expression is its use and not its referent or what it corresponds to. Second, that the description of the uses of certain expressions in language is not merely a study of words but genuinely solves the same problems which traditional philosophy had tried to solve through other methods.

scholarly journals Another way to look at counterfactuals

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 189-226
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Klein
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Additional Assumption ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Alternative Analysis ◽  
Strict Implication ◽  
Supportive Role ◽  
The World ◽  
Finite Verb

Abstract Counterfactuals such as If the world did not exist, we would not notice it have been a challenge for philosophers and linguists since antiquity. There is no generally accepted semantic analysis. The prevalent view, developed in varying forms by Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and others, enriches the idea of strict implication by the idea of a “minimal revision” of the actual world. Objections mainly address problems of maximal similarity between worlds. In this paper, I will raise several problems of a different nature and draw attention to several phenomena that are relevant for counterfactuality but rarely discussed in that context. An alternative analysis that is very close to the linguistic facts is proposed. A core notion is the “situation talked about”: it makes little sense to discuss whether an assertion is true or false unless it is clear which situation is talked about. In counterfactuals, this situation is marked as not belonging to the actual world. Typically, this is done in the form of the finite verb in the main clause. The if-clause is optional and has only a supportive role: it provides information about the world to which the situation talked about belongs. Counterfactuals only speak about some nonactual world, of which we only know what results from the protasis. In order to judge them as true or false, an additional assumption is required: they are warranted according to the same criteria that warrant the corresponding indicative assertion. Overall similarity between worlds is irrelevant.

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