The paper is a contribution to the debate on the epistemic-logical status of the thought experiments. The author deals with the epistemological uniqueness of experiments in the sense of their irreducibility to other sources of justification. In particular, he criticizes an influential argument for the irreducibility of thought experiments to general arguments. First, he introduces the radical empiricist theory of eliminativism, which considers thought experiments to be rhetorically modified arguments, uninteresting from the epistemological point of view. Second, the author presents objections to the theory, focusing on the critique of eliminativism by Tamar Szabo Gendler based on the reconstruction of Galileo's famous Pisa experiment. He shows that her reconstruction is simplistic and that a more elaborate reconstruction is needed for an appropriate assessment of the epistemic power of general argument. He proposes such a reconstruction and demonstrates that the general version of the Pisa experiment is epistemically equal to the particular one. Thus, from an epistemological perspective, Galileo's thought experiment is reducible to a straightforward argument without particular premises.
It seems with respect to mental entities that W.V.O. Quine was a reductionist, eliminativist, anti-mentalist and physicalist. He was a reductionist because he held that mental entities are physical phenomena in disguise. He was an eliminativist because he claimed that the scientific image of the world makes no room for such entities whose functioning is not connected with the use of energy. His philosophy was an anti-mentalist because he argued that mental phenomena are to be studies through behavior. He was a physicalist because in his opinion sciences should strive to present a uniform description of the world in all its aspects by referring to physical facts. If we take a closer look at his writings, however, all these assumptions are borne out only in part. The reductionist postulate is moderated by the opinion that theorems of different sciences are not fully intertranslatable. His eliminativism must cope with the argument that unmitigated physicalism obliterates the difference between human beings and zombies. Anti-mentalism is seriously undermined by the role he assigns to the process of language acquisition motivated by empathy. Physicalism is doubtful insofar as it has not been sufficiently distinguished by him from functionalism.
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