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1159Thought Experiments: State of the ArtIn Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, Routledge. pp. 1-28. 2018.This is the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments
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942How Thought Experiments Increase UnderstandingIn Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, Routledge. pp. 526-544. 2018.We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear…Read more
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840The Content-Dependence of Imaginative ResistanceIn Réhault Sébastien & Cova Florian (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury. pp. 143-166. 2018.An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we …Read more
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839The Role of Imagination in Social Scientific Discovery: Why Machine Discoverers Will Need Imagination AlgorithmsIn Mark Addis, Fernand Gobet & Peter Sozou (eds.), Scientific Discovery in the Social Sciences, Springer Verlag. 2019.When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer-use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans?…Read more
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826Towards a dual process epistemology of imaginationSynthese (2): 1-22. 2019.Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitiv…Read more
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678Philosophical Conceptual Analysis as an Experimental MethodIn Thomas Gamerschlag, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald & Wiebke Petersen (eds.), Meaning, Frames, and Conceptual Representation, Düsseldorf University Press. pp. 267-292. 2015.Philosophical conceptual analysis is an experimental method. Focusing on this helps to justify it from the skepticism of experimental philosophers who follow Weinberg, Nichols & Stich. To explore the experimental aspect of philosophical conceptual analysis, I consider a simpler instance of the same activity: everyday linguistic interpretation. I argue that this, too, is experimental in nature. And in both conceptual analysis and linguistic interpretation, the intuitions considered problematic by…Read more
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654REVIEW: James R. Brown, Laboratory of the Mind (review)Spontaneous Generations 6 (1): 237-241. 2012.Originally published in 1991, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences, is the first monograph to identify and address some of the many interesting questions that pertain to thought experiments. While the putative aim of the book is to explore the nature of thought experimental evidence, it has another important purpose which concerns the crucial role thought experiments play in Brown’s Platonic master argument.In that argument, Brown argues against naturalism and …Read more
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615Everyday Scientific Imagination: A Qualitative Study of the Uses, Norms, and Pedagogy of Imagination in ScienceScience & Education 28 (6-7): 711-730. 2019.Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived…Read more
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547Peeking Inside the Black Box: A New Kind of Scientific VisualizationMinds and Machines 29 (1): 87-107. 2018.Computational systems biologists create and manipulate computational models of biological systems, but they do not always have straightforward epistemic access to the content and behavioural profile of such models because of their length, coding idiosyncrasies, and formal complexity. This creates difficulties both for modellers in their research groups and for their bioscience collaborators who rely on these models. In this paper we introduce a new kind of visualization that was developed to add…Read more
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505Scientists are Epistemic Consequentialists about ImaginationPhilosophy of Science 1-22. forthcoming.Scientists imagine for epistemic reasons, and these imaginings can be better or worse. But what does it mean for an imagining to be epistemically better or worse? There are at least three metaepistemological frameworks that present different answers to this question: epistemological consequentialism, deontic epistemology, and virtue epistemology. This paper presents empirical evidence that scientists adopt each of these different epistemic frameworks with respect to imagination, but argues that …Read more
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494Playing the Blame Game with RobotsIn Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’21 Companion), . 2021.Recent research shows – somewhat astonishingly – that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]–[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral- psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system ru…Read more
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474The material theory of induction and the epistemology of thought experimentsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 83 (C): 17-27. 2020.John D. Norton is responsible for a number of influential views in contemporary philosophy of science. This paper will discuss two of them. The material theory of induction claims that inductive arguments are ultimately justified by their material features, not their formal features. Thus, while a deductive argument can be valid irrespective of the content of the propositions that make up the argument, an inductive argument about, say, apples, will be justified (or not) depending on facts about …Read more
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298Imagination: A Sine Qua Non of ScienceCroatian Journal of Philosophy (49): 9-32. 2017.What role does the imagination play in scientific progress? After examining several studies in cognitive science, I argue that one thing the imagination does is help to increase scientific understanding, which is itself indispensable for scientific progress. Then, I sketch a transcendental justification of the role of imagination in this process.
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220The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments (edited book)Routledge. 2018.Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, fro…Read more
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206The future won’t be pretty: The nature and value of ugly, AI-designed experimentsIn Milena Ivanova & Alice Murphy (eds.), The Aesthetics of Scientific Experiments, Routledge. 2023.Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be go…Read more
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165Guilty Artificial Minds: Folk Attributions of Mens Rea and Culpability to Artificially Intelligent AgentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2). 2021.While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for …Read more
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127How to tame your Feyerabend (review)Metascience 32 (2): 173-176. 2023.This is a book review of Karim Bschir and Jamie Shaw (eds.); Interpreting Feyerabend: critical essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 290 pp, $99.99 HB.
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94On the Origins of the Philosophy of Thought Experiments: The ForerunPerspectives on Science 22 (2): 179-220. 2014.Philosophical debate about the nature and function of thought experiments would be impoverished without good historical sources. And while valuable work is being done on the history of thought experiments, a comprehensive discussion of the history of philosophical investigation into thought experiments is still absent in the literature (but see Kühne 2005; Moue et al. 2006). In what follows we take the first steps towards providing a more complete picture of the diverse attempts to shed light on…Read more
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86P-curving x-phi: Does experimental philosophy have evidential value?Analysis 79 (4): 669-684. 2019.In this article, we analyse the evidential value of the corpus of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophers claim that their studies provide insight into philosophical problems, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concerns that the findings from these studies lack evidential value. Barriers to evidential value include selection bias and p-hacking. To find out whether the significant findings in x-phi papers result from selection bias or p-hacking, we applied a p-cur…Read more
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82Holism and Reductionism in the Illness/Disease DebateIn Shyam Wuppuluri & Ian Stewart (eds.), From Electrons to Elephants and Elections: Saga of Content and Context, Springer. pp. 743-778. 2022.In the last decades it has become clear that medicine must find some way to combine its scientific and humanistic sides. In other words, an adequate notion of medicine requires an integrative position that mediates between the analytic-reductionist and the normative-holistic tendencies we find therein. This is especially important as these different styles of reasoning separate “illness” (something perceived and managed by the whole individual in concert with their environment) and “disease” (a …Read more
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81Scientific Models and Thought Experiments: Same Same but DifferentIn Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling, Routledge. forthcoming.The philosophical literatures on models and thought experiments have been developing exponentially, and independently, for decades. This independence is surprising, given how similar models and thought experiments are. They each have “lives of their own,” they sit between theory and experience, they are important for both pedagogy and cutting-edge science, they galvanize conceptual changes and paradigm shifts, and they involve entertaining imaginary scenarios and working out what happens. Recent…Read more
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74Taming theory with thought experiments: Understanding and scientific progressStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 58 24-33. 2016.I claim that one way thought experiments contribute to scientific progress is by increasing scientific understanding. Understanding does not have a currently accepted characterization in the philosophical literature, but I argue that we already have ways to test for it. For instance, current pedagogical practice often requires that students demonstrate being in either or both of the following two states: 1) Having grasped the meaning of some relevant theory, concept, law or model, 2) Being able …Read more
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68Inclusivity in the Education of Scientific ImaginationIn E. Hildt, K. Laas, C. Miller & E. Brey (eds.), Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM, Springer Verlag. pp. 267-288. 2024.Scientists imagine constantly. They do this when generating research problems, designing experiments, interpreting data, troubleshooting, drafting papers and presentations, and giving feedback. But when and how do scientists learn how to use imagination? Across 6 years of ethnographic research, it has been found that advanced career scientists feel comfortable using and discussing imagination, while graduate and undergraduate students of science often do not. In addition, members of marginalized…Read more
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67Cognitive Science and Thought Experiments: A Refutation of Paul Thagard's SkepticismPerspectives on Science 22 (2): 264-287. 2014.Paul Thagard has recently argued that thought experiments are dangerous and misleading when we try to use them as evidence for claims. This paper refutes his skepticism. Building on Thagard’s own work in cognitive science, I suggest that Thagard has much that is positive to say about how thought experiments work. My last section presents some new directions for research on the intersection between thought experiments and cognitive science
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63Katerina Ierodiakonou and Sophie Roux, eds. Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. vii+233. €99.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 154-157. 2013.
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59The Productive Anarchy of Scientific ImaginationPhilosophy of Science 87 (5): 968-978. 2020.Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, etc. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, e.g., by using self-imposed rules to infer logically, or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers either constrain too much, or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are ne…Read more
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55Norton and the Logic of Thought ExperimentsAxiomathes 26 (4): 451-466. 2016.John D. Norton defends an empiricist epistemology of thought experiments, the central thesis of which is that thought experiments are nothing more than arguments. Philosophers have attempted to provide counterexamples to this claim, but they haven’t convinced Norton. I will point out a more fundamental reason for reformulation that criticizes Norton’s claim that a thought experiment is a good one when its underlying logical form possesses certain desirable properties. I argue that by Norton’s em…Read more
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54Sharpening the tools of imaginationSynthese 200 (6): 1-22. 2022.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 distincti…Read more
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51Motivating the History of the Philosophy of Thought ExperimentsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 212-221. 2021.This is the introduction to a special issue of HOPOS on the history of the philosophy of thought experiments.
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46Telling Stories in Science: Feyerabend and Thought ExperimentsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 262-281. 2021.The history of the philosophy of thought experiments has touched on the work of Kuhn, Popper, Duhem, Mach, Lakatos, and other big names of the 20th century, but so far, almost nothing has been written about Paul Feyerabend. His most influential work was Against Method, 8 chapters of which concern a case study of Galileo with a specific focus on Galileo’s thought experiments. In addition, the later Feyerabend was very interested in what might be called the epistemology of drama, including stories…Read more
University of Toronto, St. George Campus
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science
PhD, 2015
York, York, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
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