Raman, Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments and Empirical Experiments (1/2)

If you are a natural-science person (or a psychology person), you will most likely have to take a class in experimental design while you are here at Penn State. Experiments are the cornerstone of the scientific method, so it makes sense to devote significant attention to understanding how they work, what makes some better than others, and what their limitations are. For the last several weeks, I have talked about thought experiments and the role they play in philosophy and science (If you haven’t already and you are interested in thought experiments in science, check out my posts on Relativity and The Importance of Thought Experiments to Modern Physics). For these last two posts, I want to shift gears and talk about the relationship between thought experiments and empirical experiments.

Over the course of writing this passion blog, one of my major objectives has been to dismiss the notion that thought experiments are something people use to speculate about the world from their armchairs without actually observing anything, and that empirical experiments are “better” for learning about “real” things. Empirical experiments and thought experiments are both important tools people can use to understand our world, and they each have their own distinct purposes. Especially in fields like Physics and Neurology, thought experiments can help scientists both to determine what kind of empirical experiments to perform and how to make sense of the results of those experiments. There are certainly places where empirical experiments are “better” than thought experiments, but there are also places, even in the natural sciences, where thought experiments are “better” (one of which is in determining what makes a given method of examination “better”, but this is a subject that requires a more thorough treatment than I am prepared to offer here).

In the 21st century, one of the places where empirical and thought experiments have both come into conflict and complimented each other tremendously is in neurology. If you are interested in neurology, philosophy of science, or intellectually stimulating conversation in general, I highly recommend that you take 13 minutes and 22 seconds to listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast interview with Barry Smith on the interaction between these two tool sets for exploring the mind (the interview can be found at http://philosophybites.com/2008/09/barry-smith-on.html) and, if you enjoy that, as many of their neuroscience focused interviews as you can handle (which can be found here http://philosophybites.com/neuroscience/). Essentially, Dr. Smith lays out the role that each method has in advancing both neuroscience and the various related philosophical disciplines. To him, philosophers are too skeptical of evidence from empirical experiments that contradicts their expectations, which he believes is hampering the discipline’s progress. On the other hand, he recognizes that philosophers were the first people to raise the kinds of questions neuroscience explores, that their thought experiments provided an important starting place for the empirical research, and that, in his own words, when it comes to “pathologies and neurological breakdown, help is needed by the neurologists and biologists from the philosophers to help to explain how to characterize these experiences, to understand what they’re like, and to contrast them with normal experience.”

In my next post, I am going to discuss what makes a good empirical experiment, what makes a good thought experiment, and compare and contrast the two.

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