Abstract
In this article thought experiments are uncovered as key stimuli of philosophical potential in children’s literature and their presentation and function is examined in a selection of focal texts, including: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871); Even the Parrot by Dorothy Sayers (1944); Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War (1974); and A Game of Soldiers (1985) by Jan Needle. The thought experiment is a device common to science and philosophy and has been recognised as an heuristic tool in literature generally, but here children’s literature is drawn into the conversation, revealing that—as a dynamic mechanism of children’s narrative—thought experiments have a long-standing and particular role to play in books for young people. This paper connects with a recent turn in children’s literature discourse toward the conditions of power in books for young readers; it moves on the debate by demonstrating that the apparatus of thought experimentation places the implied child reader in a position of philosophical responsibility and forward thinking. Presenting thought experiments in different ways, formal properties of the thought experiment—such as conversational mode, double engagement and modal positioning—are identified and shown to open up a philosophical space of subsequence in children’s texts.
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Notes
A town in North Derbyshire, England.
“Wittgenstein’s Beetle” is a well-known thought experiment which appears in point 293 of Philosophical Investigations (1968/1953).
Specifically Wittgenstein is considering private sensations in relation to the words that might seem to describe them (e.g. “pain”), but his thought experiment has been applied more broadly.
Maria Nikolajeva “proposes the concept of aetonormativity” as an expression of the “adult normativity that governs the way children’s literature has been patterned” (2010, p. 8).
Mach is not the first to conduct what we now recognise as thought experiments, but he identified systematically the process whereby thought leads to new ways of comprehending the world. The precise knowledge ensuing from thought experiments is much debated. For a useful discussion of this in relation to aesthetics, see the section “Thought Experiments and Literature” in Davies (2007, pp. 157–163).
Thereby avoiding generalizations about the role of thought experiments in different contexts/disciplines, which is nuanced and complex.
“According to act consequentialism, morally right actions are those that do, or are expected to, generate either the very best results, or sufficiently good results, as compared to all of the other actions available to a person at a given time.” (Shafer-Landau: 2007, p. 453).
Etymology traced in the Oxford Dictionary of Etymology (Onions, 1966).
In legal documents, this refers especially to buildings or land, hence the modern notion of a building(s) as premises.
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Lisa Sainsbury is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton (UK) and has been a member of the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Roehampton since 1996. She is Series Editor of Perspectives on Children’s Literature, a new series for Bloomsbury Academic. Her current area of research is philosophy and contemporary children’s literature. Her recent book, Ethics and British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life (Sainsbury, 2013), explores ethical spheres relevant to books for young people, such as: naughtiness, good and evil, family life, and environmental ethics.
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Sainsbury, L. “But The Soldier’s Remains Were Gone”: Thought Experiments in Children’s Literature. Child Lit Educ 48, 152–168 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9274-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9274-6