Some thoughts on Cooper, Peijnenburg & Atkinson, Nercessian, Brown, and Norton

I've decided to focus my attention on the papers by Cooper (CP), Peijnenburg/Atkinson (PA) and Nercessian (NS) -- along the way, I discuss Brown a little a bit, and spend most of my time defending Norton (NT) against challenges. With some notable exceptions, I'm essentially in agreement with Cohnitz and NT (especially the latter), so I don't discuss them directly here. And as for Buzzoni, well, virtually all of my comments take the form: "What the hell does he mean by that?", so I left his paper out too. (Of course, I'd be happy to hear what you guys thought about it -- hopefully you'll be better able to explain to me what he's up to!)
**Sorry for any typos -- I'm kinda pressed for time today**


CP's "Thought Experiments"


1. CP claims that it isn't clear what NT means by 'argument'. But isn't this painfully obvious? Not only does NT explicitly specify the types of arguments his account allows (i.e. deductive, inductive, abductive/inference-to-the-best-explanation, etc.), but he offers numerous examples of reconstructions of TEs.
2. CP (approvingly, it seems) cites Bishop (1999) as arguing that "[NT]'s account cannot account for cases where people disagree about the results of a [TE]. In such cases the parties reconstruct the [TE] as two different arguments, but they are discussing the same [TE]." This looks like a version of an objection that several philosophers have hurled NT's way (see, e.g., PA and NS for similar worries). In any case, it doesn't seem to carry any weight. Why can't the parties also present arguments for their argument-reconstructions of a TE? Indeed, this is the kind of thing we do in philosophy ad nauseum; it's where we spend most of our time, especially with regard to history of philosophy. It takes a lot of work to defend a particular interpretation of someone's reasoning -- usually, one will have to defend one's interpretation against heavy criticism. But NT's account has no problem with this, since it's still within the epistemically friendly realm of rational argument. Finally, it's worth pointing out that NT never claims that his reconstructions are decisively accurate -- in fact, by arguing against one of NT's reconstructions, we're engaging in precisely the sort of epistemically safe activity NT recommends vis-a-vis TEs.
3. The next failed objection to NT also shows up (in a different guise) in NS's discussion, but I'll briefly mention CP's version of it here. (I spend much more time on NS's version.) CP claims that NT's account can't be right because while TEs are "fun and easy", arguments are (presumably) boring and difficult. That claim itself is disputable, but the objection itself seems beside the point. It's really no more persuasive than the following argument. Let X be "P-->Q. P. So: Q." and Y be "Look dude, if you eat 50 cheeseburgers right now, you'll have a heart attack. Oh my god! You just ate 50 cheeseburgers! You're gonna have a heart attack!" X and Y are both deductive arguments with the same logical structure (i.e. modus ponens). Surely, some (many) people will find the one about cheeseburgers and heart attacks way more interesting and easy to follow (especially if they aren't trained in logic, or if they don't like dealing with abstract structure etc.) than the barebones-Ps-and-Qs. So there's a plausible phenomenological difference here, but it does nothing to cast doubt on the claim that they're both deductive arguments with the same logical form. And if that make sense, why is it any less compelling in response to CP's objection to NT?
4. CP claims that Hume's Missing Shade case is a counterexample to NT's account (i.e. a TE that can't be captured in propositional-argument form). For starters, I don't see how Hume's case can't be reconstructed as an argument. (Why else would we take it to show anything?) Also, BR might characterize it as a psycho-linguistic experiment; and if BR's right, then it's not a TE, in which case it doesn't threaten NT's account. It's also possible that Hume's case is an TE-qua-argument which is best carried out first-personally as a quasi-psycho-linguistic experiment.
5. CP's discussion of BR's account made me revisit my earlier worries about knowledge, perception and causation. Originally, I granted that while knowledge might not require physical causation, perception clearly does. But now I'm doubting the knowledge-side too. After all, unless we're substance dualists, knowledge must get realized at the level of the brain. If so, then all knowledge must involve some kind of causal mediation -- in particular, physical causal mediation. I'm still fuzzy on the details, but I suspect a deep problem for BR's account.
6. CP claims that "in answering the 'what if' questions [of TEs] we predict how imaginary entities will behave in the same way that we predict how real entities will behave", and that "the basic forms of reasoning used to manipulate the model will be the same as those we use to predict occurrences in the real world." This is a defining feature of CP's account, and it seems plausible, but predictions in the 'real world' take the form of inductive inferences. NT's account clearly allows for inductive inferences, so how does CP's account threaten NT's?
7. According to CP, "If the thought experimenter manages to construct an internally consistent model, and thus construct a possible world, then she can conclude that the situation she has imagined is possible." (emphasis added) For starters, this clearly has the dialectical shape of argument, so again, I'm having trouble ascertaining any threat to NT's account. I guess it comes down to what CP takes to be the scope of TEs -- that is, adopting BR's useful terminology, whether TEs are broad or narrow on CP's account. Suppose they're broad in BR's sense. Then any given TE includes not just the construction of an internally consistent model, but also the preliminary inference that the constructed model (therefore) represents a possible world, and followed by the inference that the imagined situation is (therefore) possible. If that's not an argument, I don't know what is.
8. Contra BR, CP claims that TEs showing that a "situation is possible... can indirectly teach us about the world", by showing us "how the world cannot be... and how the world must be." I think she's spot-on here, but why such TEs only do so indirectly? Think of Putnam's Super-Spartans TE against Extreme Philosophical Behaviorism (EPB). According to EPB, pain (e.g.) is nothing but a series of publicly observable behaviors, such as winces and moans. But Super-Spartans, while they still feel pain (e.g. it hurts when you stab them in leg), have trained themselves to suppress all publicly observable behaviors associated with pain-response. If Putnam's TE works, doesn't it directly show that (roughly) there's more to pain than just pain-responses? Meh, this is probably just quibbling...
9. Finally, I'm confused about something... on CP's account, all the magic takes place in constructing internally consistent models, viz., representations of possible worlds or situations. But she claims that some of the best TEs depict physically impossible situations. What's going on here?


PA's "When are Thought Experiments Good Ones?"


1. While I'm in no position to properly discuss the so-called 'definitional' issue, PA's paper got me wondering about a few things. PA, like many others in the literature, don't see any pressing need to give a clear definition of TEs; moreover, they claim that we don't even need a definition in order say "when [TEs] are good [or bad] ones" -- we don't need to know what TEs are in order to know what TEs should do. This just looks bonkers to me. If we don't have a clear idea of what TEs are, then how could we be in any position to justifiably say anything about what they should do? Indeed, aren't these features somewhat interdependent? E.g. part of the definition of a TE should either include or entail what TEs should do, i.e. when they're successful, when they're failures, etc. Of course, it need not be an exact, perfectly crisp definition. 'Either we have an exact, perfectly crisp definition of X or we have no definition of X' is a horrendous false dichotomy. It seems obvious to me that we need at least a substantially clear idea of what something is (even if only via stipulation!) before we can say anything about what counts as a good instance of it, or what role(s) or function(s) it has, and so forth. Anyway, just a thought...
2. PA claim that "a [TE] can only be deemed successful if it induces the same -- true of false -- belief in the majority of people that are exposed to it." On the face of it, this looks like a (fallacious) appeal to popularity: 'Most people believe X after they're exposed to my TE, so it's gotta be good!' How many people need to share this belief? How close must their degree of belief (or credence) correspond? Which people matter? Anyone, or experts in the relevant domain (and if so, how much expertise?), or just fairly intelligent non-experts? (There's a good reason why, e.g., after being exposed to the Shrodinger's Cat TE, a physicist shouldn't put much stock in my snap judgement that it shows X -- namely, I'm not a physicist, which means (among other things) that I'm in no position to make informed judgements about problems in physics.) Also, when people don't share the belief, are they unconvinced by the result (which may be due to strongly held or even dogmatic antecedent convictions), the setup (which may be due to misunderstanding), etc.? Also, how can we reliably determine that underlying cognitive errors aren't at work? (e.g. the 'selection effect', whereby strong beliefs tend to generate their own confirmation, 'confirmation bias', 'cognitive dissonance', etc.) Anyway, this looks very sketchy. While it would nice for TEs to generate collective, near-unanimous conviction, we shouldn't make it a test. 6 billion people could be induced to share the same belief -- and, let's suppose, to exactly the same degree -- on the basis of a bad TE. [Note: In a similar vein, PA claim that good TEs induce a kind of flash of insight to people who encounter them. I agree that it's surely nice if a TE can do that, but is this essential to all good TEs, or is it just happy psychological by-product? (Cf. BR's Mediative TEs.)]
3. PA claim that in cases where two or more philosophers disagree on the outcome of a (philosophical) TE, "there is no way to tell who is right" At best, their disagreement can only pushed down "to another level". This looks unwarranted -- the fact that, presently at least, there seems to be no way adjudicate among competing views regarding a TE does not show that there's no way to do so (much less in principle). Also, to "shunt disagreement to another level" is actually a good thing: it might help us to get clearer as to the source of the disagreement, or give us a better understanding of what's at stake, or even move the debate into more tractable waters. Moreover, why can't philosophers critically evaluate each other's "starting points" (i.e. the "level" that, according to PA, disagreement over the TE gets 'shunted' to)? There are surely cases in which a philosopher disagrees with the outcome of some TE on the basis of an untenable -- or at least highly dubious -- starting point (e.g. Cartesian substance dualism, verificationism, etc.) -- there's nothing dialectically weird about that.
4. The fact that people have intuitions about a TE doesn't imply that it generates "contradictory conclusions". Also, as I mentioned above, disagreement about the status of the TE can be traced to a plethora of factors. In any case, one can and should rationally defend one's intuitions about a TE, and there's a world of difference between rational disagreement about a TE's status, one the one hand, and whether a TE generates "contradictory conclusions", on the other. So PA's first test of whether a TE is a bad one is strange and misleading at best. (As I'll show below, the second test fares even worse.)
5. If PA are right, then philosophy itself (viz., as an area of inquiry), rather than just TEs in philosophy, looks deeply suspect -- or as PA put it, "... doomed to go round on a merry-go-round". After all, philosophers often fundamentally disagree about "starting points", and they rarely reach any clear agreement after attempts to convince one another. Are PA aware of this extreme metaphilosophical skepticism that lurks within their account?
6. The second test for whether a TE is a bad one is whether its "conclusion begs the question". Did you catch that?---whether the conclusion begs the question! That doesn't even make sense. Last time I checked, ONLY PREMISES CAN BEG THE QUESTION. Absolutely ridiculous. Second test = FAIL. :) And that means that PA's account is essentially bunk, since their two tests are untenable.
7. PA claim that one problem with philosophical TEs is that -- unlike many TEs in science (see the EPR stuff) -- "it is unclear how we ever could put [them] to the [empirical] test... ethical considerations aside." That's a total red herring. It's no better than someone who questions the epistemic legitimacy of induction on the ground that an inductive argument can't logically guarantee (i.e. deductively entail) its conclusion. Ugh.
8. Finally, I know I said I wouldn't talk about Cohnitz, but I just wanna note and expand on an excellent point he raises. (Strangely, it's only a footnote!) Basically, on PA's account, it seems we can never know whether any given TE (in science) is bad, since there might be some experiment down the line to vindicate it. (Again, see the stuff on EPR for an example.) That's bad enough, but it seems to apply to TEs in philosophy too. The history of philosophy is replete with examples of once-thought-philosophical-problems-that-became-scientific-problems. So, e.g., while the Chinese seems like a TE in philosophy about a philosophical problem, it might turn out (given, e.g., tremendous advances in cognitive neuroscience) to fall within the ambit of science after all.


NS's "Thought Experimenting as Mental Modeling"

1. NS claims that NT's account requires "soundness...a truth-preserving guarantee". But this is a mischaracterization of NT's account. NT allows not only for deductive arguments (which can provide for soundness and validity [i.e. "a truth-preserving guarantee"]), but for inductive and abductive (i.e. inference to the best explanation) arguments as well. This is a huge mistake on NS's part. Given such fundamental misinterpretations (there are others -- see below), it's hard to imagine how she could be in any position to critically assess NT's account.
2. NS claims that an essential feature of (most/all?) TEs is that they involve a narrative structure, and this is why -- she thinks -- NT's Argument account can't be the whole story. Well, for starters, NT never claims that his account is anything like the whole story. He frankly admits that his account isn't designed to explain every feature of TEs and thought-experimentation. Indeed, his account is an answer or attempted solution to a single problem, namely, the epistemological problem. But there are other things to be worried about here: Why is a narrative structure incompatible with an argument-structure? TEs could still be arguments that can -- and, for various reasons (e.g. rhetorical, pedagogical, facilitative, etc.), probably should -- be converted into a more attractive and widely accessible narrative form, especially to non-experts with respect to some domain. More generally, CP might surely be right that TEs-qua-narratives are (at least generally) easier and more fun than TEs-qua-arguments. (We might put this in Fregean terms: while a TE-qua-narrative and TE-qua-argument surely have distinct senses, they have the same referent. The fact that each has its own 'mode of presentation' does not entail each picks out a distinct referent.) Finally, as NS emphasizes, as they appear in their final "polished... narrative form", TEs are the upshot of much painstaking work, and only appear in their narrative "... after the experimenter has determined that it achieves the desired outcome." This seems to suggest two results: First, if NS is right, then strictly speaking, the TE-qua-narrative is unnecessary -- it's useful, of course (e.g. for rhetorical and pedagogical purposes), but not at all necessary. Second, this further suggests that the TE-qua-argument is really doing all the painstaking work: after all, the experimenter only converts the TE into a narrative form after she's independently established that it achieves the result conveyed or illustrated by the TE-qua-narrative. Indeed, NS peppers her discussion of (what I've been calling) TEs-qua-narratives with remarks and qualifications that are exactly in line with what I've been suggesting -- e.g. TEs being "conveyed through" narratives; TEs-qua-narratives being useful pedagogical tools in "facilitating understanding"; TEs-qua-narratives being "effective rhetorical devices". (I'll provide more examples during our meeting on Tuesday.)
3. There's more I wanted to say about NS's own account (rather than her criticisms of NT's account), but I'll save it for our meeting on Tuesday -- this entry is already far too long!