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Thought experiments without possible worlds

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Abstract

The method of thought experiments or possible cases is widespread in philosophy and elsewhere. Thought experiments come with variegated theoretical commitments. These commitments are risky. They may turn out to be false or at least controversial. Other things being equal, it seems preferable to do with minimal commitments. I explore exemplary ways of minimising commitments, focusing on modal ones. There is a near-consensus to treat the scenarios considered in thought experiments as metaphysical possibilities (most aptly treated as possible worlds). I challenge this consensus. Paradigmatic thought experiments do not have to come with a commitment to metaphysical possibilities. In the first section, I point out difficulties with the prevailing focus on metaphysical possibilities. In the second section, I present alternative formalisations of a paradigmatic thought experiment, the Gettier experiment. Gettier’s words leave open the kind of possibilities under consideration. The standard way of spelling out Gettier’s argument uses metaphysical possibilities. One alternative proposal uses nomological possibilities. A second one uses epistemic possibilities. My modest conclusion: as long as it is not established that a thought experiment requires a commitment to metaphysical modality, one should avoid such a commitment. My preferred way of doing so is to replace the commitment to one particular formalisation by a commitment to a disjunction of alternative formalisations.

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Notes

  1. Van Inwagen himself is moved by epistemological concerns.

  2. However, Horvath (2015) tries to develop a pattern of rigorous suppositional reasoning which perfectly captures our actual route and does without metaphysical modality.

  3. This is already a logically weaker version of Williamson’s original proposal (cf. 2007, 199).

  4. I am neutral as to whether the laws also include laws of the special sciences.

  5. Cf. Smith 2007. His ceteris paribus conditionals might also take care of deviant realisations.

  6. It is plausible that the logical principles used by Williamson (2007, 186-187) in completing Alternative A apply to Alternative B in this context.

  7. For related criticism Ichikawa and Jarvis 2013, 203.

  8. An alternative approach is to replace the counterfactual by a suitably restricted strict conditional (cf. Ichikawa and Jarvis 2009, 2013, criticised in Sect. 2.2.1.).

  9. I have argued that, in Gettier’s times, metaphysical modalities were more contentious than they are today. For instance, Seddon (1972) runs together logical with nomological possibility and positive probability. Perhaps Gettier held a similar view.

  10. Some philosophers construe epistemic possibilities in terms of centred worlds (e.g. Chalmers 2011). Thus, it is not fully clear that epistemic possibilities evade the ideological complexities of a possible worlds-framework.

  11. The original context of Briggs’s proposal is formulating Lewis’s Principal Principle.

  12. As a consequence of conceiving of aprioricity in terms of credence 1 and 0, respectively, no empirical evidence can yield absolute certainty that there never is a case of GC (which is NKJTB).

  13. One might object that (C5) in this view does not reflect the positive evidential role of GC. But if the thought experiment is construed as an exercise of conceptual knowledge, it is to be expected that GC mainly plays the psychological role of activating implicit conceptual knowledge.

  14. For the stronger premiss to work, deviant realisations would have to be dismissed as too outlandish in the current context (cf. Williams 2008, 216).

  15. The cognitive mechanism guiding this awareness may be availability heuristics (on the epistemological significance of the latter cf. Hawthorne 2004; Williamson 2005).

  16. We are still far from the claim that epistemology should be replaced by empirical science (cf. Pernu 2009).

  17. To put it more cautiously: the proposition I express by the string of words ‘water is XYZ’ is true, and it differs from the one I express by the same string given water is H 2 O.

  18. A case that illustrates the advantages of not simply going for possible worlds is the debate on the relevance of slow-switching arguments, issuing in the real-life chicory-arugula example (Ludlow 1995).

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  1. Institut für Philosophie, HU Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Dohrn

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Dohrn, D. Thought experiments without possible worlds. Philos Stud 175, 363–384 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0871-z

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