Bonus page ·

Thought experiments

Not empiricemes. A thought experiment asserts nothing, so it cannot be true or false, and the ledger’s register column has no purchase on it.

Two things are recorded for each instead. What the experiment is for, since a reductio and an intuition pump are doing different jobs and fail in different ways. And its standing, which here means something specific: experimental philosophy has actually run many of these on people, and the results are not what the popular account suggests.

The early finding that philosophical intuitions varied by culture, which would have been a serious problem for the whole method, has largely failed to replicate. What survives is narrower and more interesting: a few intuitions really are artefacts of how the case is put, and the clearest of them is the one Nozick used to refute hedonism.