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The Life and Importance of TEs

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Abstract

Let us now turn to a description of the ways TEs normally function. We shall first consider a typical TE and its ‘biography’, the stages it normally goes through. Then, we shall briefly address the question of the point of thought-experimenting: what is the role of TEs in science, mathematics and philosophy? Next we shall briefly discuss the immediate result of a TE, usually described as “intuition” generated by the TE.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am following Kent A. Peacock’s short overview (Peacock 2018) and Melanie Frappier’s (2004) extremely interesting dissertation on Microscope TE.

  2. 2.

    His book Anschauliche Geometrie (1932) has been translated in 1952 as Geometry and imagination, but the tradition of using “intuitive” for “quasi-perceptual” has stayed with philosophers of mathematics and science. Poincaré in his The Value of science writes “Logic (…) is the instrument of demonstration; intuition is the instrument of invention …” (Poincaré 1958:23).

  3. 3.

    The traditional apriorist view has been defended by authors like BonJour, (1998) and Casullo (2003, 2012); for further reading see Boghossian and Peacocke (eds.) (2000). For the empiricist alternative see Devitt (2005). For an interesting third way proposal see Williamson (2013).

  4. 4.

    Thanks go to my colleague and friend Friderik Klampfer, for insisting on TEs being superfluous for ethics, see his Klampfer (2017).

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  1. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Dr. Nenad Miscevic

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Correspondence to Nenad Miscevic .

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Miscevic, N. (2022). The Life and Importance of TEs. In: Thought Experiments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81082-5_2

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