Abstract
Thought experiments, models, diagrams, computer simulations, and metaphors can all be understood as tools of the imagination. While these devices are usually treated separately in philosophy of science, this paper provides a unified account according to which tools of the imagination are epistemically good insofar as they improve scientific imaginings. Improving scientific imagining is characterized in terms of epistemological consequences: more improvement means better consequences. A distinction is then drawn between tools being good in retrospect, at the time, and in general. In retrospect, tools are evaluated straightforwardly in terms of the quality of their consequences. At the cutting edge, tools are evaluated positively insofar as there is reason to believe that using them will have good consequences. Lastly, tools can be generally good, insofar as their use encourages the development of epistemic virtues, which are good because they have good epistemic consequences.
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Notes
For more on the connection between Bacon and imagination, see Corneanu and Vermeir (2012).
Different tools of imagination can subsume one another and work together in interesting ways. For example, TEs can include visualisations and metaphors. Simulations can include visualizations. Visualizations can sometimes be thought of as TEs. This helpfully complexifies the analysis to more accurately reflect scientific practice, but it does not suggest that any of these tools is not a tool of imagination. I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
The work of David Gooding and Marco Buzzoni is especially conciliant with this idea. For example, Gooding writes that the success of a TE is at least partially a measure of how well it is able to spread in a discipline (Gooding, 1992), and Buzzoni characterizes the quality of (empirical) scientific TEs at least partially in terms of whether they “would lead to the consequences that they predict” (Buzzoni, 2008, p. 97). I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
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I would like to thank audiences at Salzburg, Tubingen, and the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, as well as the Swiss National Science Foundation for funding (grant number PZ00P1_179986).
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Stuart, M.T. Sharpening the tools of imagination. Synthese 200, 451 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03939-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03939-w