Thought Experiments, Formalization, and Disagreement

On Possibilities and Thought Experiments∗

This paper concerns two related recent books by Nicholas Rescher, Imagining Irreality on possibilities and What If? on thought experiments—see [23] and [24]. The books are related because a theory on thought experiments presupposes a theory on possibilities. The effect of this and of the fact that they have a wider range of application than thought experiments will be that possibilities will re...

Actual Causes and Thought Experiments

Four theories proposing determinate relations of actual causation for Boolean networks are described and applied to 16 cases. All four theories are founded on the idea that actual causation is based on results that appropriate experimental interventions would produce. They differ in their accounts of the relevant kinds of experimental interventions. The more complex theories are motivated by tr...

Holographic Thought Experiments

The Hamiltonian of classical anti-de Sitter gravity is a pure boundary term on-shell. If this remains true in non-perturbative quantum gravity then i) boundary observables will evolve unitarily in time and ii) the algebra of boundary observables is the same at all times. In particular, information available at the boundary at any one time t1 remains available at any other time t2. Since there i...

Student Resistance to Thought-Experiments

Thought experiments on gravitational forces

Large contributions to the near closure of the Universe and to the acceleration of its expansion are due to the gravitation of components of the stress–energy tensor other than its mass density. To familiarize astronomers with the gravitation of these components we conduct thought experiments on gravity, analogous to the real experiments that our forebears conducted on electricity. By analogy t...