Abstract
The literature on thought experiments has been mainly concernedwith thought experiments that are directed at a theory, be it in aconstructive or a destructive manner. This has led somephilosophers to argue that all thought experiments can beformulated as arguments. The aim of this paper is to drawattention to a type of thought experiment that is not directed ata theory, but fulfills a specific function within a theory. Suchthought experiments are referred to as functional thoughtexperiments, and they are routinely used in applied statistics. An example is given from frequentist statistics, where a thoughtexperiment is required to establish the probability space. It isconcluded that (a) not all thought experiments can be formulated asarguments, and (b) the role of thought experiments is more generaland more important to scientific reasoning than has previouslybeen recognized.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Brown, J. R.: 1991, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences, Routledge, London.
Bunzl, M.: 1996, ‘The Logic of Thought Experiments’, Synthese 106, 227–240.
Dennett, D. C.: 1991, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown, Boston.
Edgeworth, F. Y.: 1888, ‘The Statistics of Examinations’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 51, 598–635.
Fine, T. L.: 1973, Theories of Probability, Academic Press, New York.
Hacking, I.: 1965, Logic of Statistical Inference, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Hacking, I.: 1990, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge University press, Cambridge.
Hambleton, R. K. and H. Swaminathan: 1985, Item Response Theory: Principles and applications, Kluwer-Nijhoff, Boston.
Holland, P. W.: 1986, ‘Statistics and Causal Inference’, Journal of the American Statistical Association 81, 945–959.
Horowitz, T. and G. J. Massey (eds): 1991, Thought Experiments in Science and hilosophy, Rowman and Littlefield, Savage, MD.
Kolmogorov, A.: 1933, Grundbegriffe der Warscheinlichkeitsrechnung, Springer, Berlin.
Kuhn, T. S.: 1977, ‘A Function for Thought Experiments’, in T. S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Lazarsfeld, P. F.: 1959, Latent Structure Analysis, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Lord, F. M. and M. R. Novick: 1968, Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Mach, E.: 1905/1976, Knowledge and Error, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Nagel, E.: 1936, Principles of the Theory of Probability, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Norton, J.: 1991, ‘Thought Experiments in Einstein's Work’, in T. Horowitz and G. J. Massey (eds), Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, Rowman and Littlefield: Savage, MD.
Rényi, A.: 1970, Foundations of Probability, Holdaen-Day, San Francisco.
Rubin, D.: 1974, ‘Estimating Causal Effects of Treatments in Randomized and Nonran-domized Studies’, Journal of Educational Psychology 66, 688–701.
Sorensen, R.: 1992, Thought Experiments, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Stigler, S. M.: 1986, The History of Statistics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Wilkes, K.: 1988, Real People, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Borsboom, D., Mellenbergh, G.J. & van Heerden, J. Functional Thought Experiments. Synthese 130, 379–387 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014840616403
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014840616403