What is the role of thought experiments in scientific exploration? Can they provide us with new knowledge about the world? In a recent article, Lorenzo Sartori argues that thought experiments function like ordinary (material) experiments: Both material experiments and thought experiments are made in a specific context, which must then be extrapolated and generalized to say something true about the world. This article discusses and criticizes Sartori’s proposal. It suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding thought experiments, their argumentative role, and how they provide new knowledge about the world. The presented framework is a coherentist framework, where coherence has three aspects: consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness. The proposal is that the argumentative role of thought experiments is to demonstrate the presence or absence of consistency, cohesiveness, and comprehensiveness, thereby strengthening a theory, weakening a theory, or showing one theory to be better than another. This is the way thought experiments provides new knowledge about the world, since the way we learn something new about the world is by discovering which theories about the world are most coherent.
The article considers descriptive statements about languages and language phenomena and seeks to determine how such statements can be 'true'. Descriptive statements about languages are considered from the points of view of the correspondence and coherence theories of truth and from the point of view of hypothetic-deductive testing. It is argued that descriptive statements about languages are rationally discussable interpretations disciplined by what we can observe within a given paradigm, and that issues of truth and issues of empirical testing should be distinguished.
The present article takes up the issue of whether Hegel’s accounts of religion can be regarded as phenomenological analyses. This is a complex issue that concerns both the “Religion” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. At first, an account is given of how Hegel understands phenomenology. Then this is used as the basis for an evaluation of his analyses of religion in the Phenomenology and the Lectures. The thesis is that these two analyses, although separated by many years, in fact show clear signs of methodological continuity and can indeed be regarded as phenomenological at least on Hegel’s own definition. This reading offers us a way to resolve the long-standing problem of whether the Phenomenology of Spirit can be seen as a genuinely unified text. Moreover, it shows the little-recognized connection between Hegel’s early philosophy of religion and his later philosophy of religion from his Berlin lectures.
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