NERSESİAN Teorisyen Laboratuvarında Zihinsel Modelleme Olarak Düşünce Deneyi
NERSESİAN Teorisyen Laboratuvarında Zihinsel Modelleme Olarak Düşünce Deneyi
NERSESİAN Teorisyen Laboratuvarında Zihinsel Modelleme Olarak Düşünce Deneyi
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Nancy J. Nersessian
Princeton University
1. Introduction
After a long period of neglect there has been a recent wave of interest in thought
experiments in science, in mathematics, and in philosophy (See, e.g., Horowitz &
Massey, 1991). I will restrict my analysis to thought experiments as they function in
science, although I believe the account has implications for thought experiments, gen-
erally. The two most influential views on the topic in philosophy and history of sci-
ence in this century represent the extremes of empiricism and rationalism. Pierre
Duhem dismissed all thought experiments as bogus precisely because they are "not
only not realized but incapable of being realized" (Duhem 1914, p.202). That is, either
they can be turnedinto real experiments - and, thus the "thought"dimension is incon-
sequential-or they are to be dismissed because they are not "experimental"at all.
Alexandre Koyr6 (1939, 1968), on the other hand, arguedthat the idealizing function
of thought experiments is essential to scientific thinking. Idealizationis requiredfor
the "mathematization"of nature and this can only be carriedout in the mind, not in the
laboratory. Thus, Koyre concluded thought experiment supplantsreal-worldexperi-
mentationand demonstrates the synthetic a priori natureof scientific knowledge.
Historians have argued against Koyre mainly on the basis of evidence that Galileo
actually performed many of what he presented as thought experiments. This does not,
however, undermine the point that extrapolation to the limit and other forms of ab-
straction can only be carried out in thought. Philosophers of science, under the influ-
ence of logical positivism, have found Duhem's view most sympathetic and, until
quite recently, it has been the predominant position. Thought experiments, while
perhaps of psychological value, make no significant contributionto scientific reason-
ing. This stance is based on a limited conception of what constitutes "reasoning".
"Reasoning"is customarily taken to comprise applying formal rules of inference to
systems of propositions. However, a fuller account needs to extend the notion of rea-
soning to include the types of non-algorithmic inferences employed in a "reasoned
change of view" (Harman 1986, Nersessian 1988, 1992). Thought experimenting is a
principal means through which scientists change their conceptual structures. I pro-
pose that thought experimenting is a form of"simulative model-based reasoning".
That is, thought experimenters reason by manipulatingmental models of the situation
I have been arguing for some time now that if we treat conceptual change not as
something inherentin languages or ideas, but as something accomplished by human
agents, then how human cognitive capacities and limitations facilitate and constrain
the practices scientists employ in conceptual innovation and change become pertinent
to philosophical analysis. From the perspective of methodological practices of scien-
tists, thoughtexperimenting has proven highly effective in numerous instances of
conceptual change. One of my concerns in developing an account of conceptual
change in science is to develop what Ronald Giere (1992) has called "the cognitive
foundations"for such model-based reasoning, which, on my analysis, includes the use
of analogical and visual models as well as thought experiments. Providing this foun-
dation will establish that these heuristics are not ancillary, dispensable aids to think-
ing-while the "real"reasoning takes place by deductive or inductive arguments-but
are reasoning methods essential to the practice of science. Recent work in cognitive
psychology is pertinentfor developing a framework in which to analyze the practice
of thought experimenting. Examining the literatureon mental modeling duringnarra-
There are several distinct theoretical accounts of mental models that tend to be
conflated in the literature. The most significant distinction for our purposes is be-
tween those investigations that treat mental models as structuresstored in long term
memory and then called upon in reasoning and those that treatthem as temporary
structuresconstructed in working memory for a specific reasoning task. I am con-
cerned with the latter in this analysis, where the mental model is constructed from the
thought experimental narrativeand used in reasoning. Since Philip Johnson-Laird's
account is the best articulatedof those analyses that focus on the temporaryreasoning
structure,it will inform my discussion. In general terms, a mental model is a struc-
tural analog of a real-world or imaginary situation, event, or process that the mind
constructs to reason with. What it means for a mental model to be a structuralanalog
is that it embodies a representationof the spatial and temporal relations among and
the causal structureconnecting the events and entities depicted.
they can satisfy the model-building and simulative constraintsnecessary for the activ-
ity of mental modeling. I cannot go deeply into the "format"issue here, but to ally
possible objections to the "image-like" nature of such models, I want to stress that
most researcherswould concur in the view that mental modeling, even if it does make
use of the mechanisms of the visual cortex, is not like constructinga picture in the
mind. That great thought experimenters, such as Bohr, have claimed not to be able to
visualize well does not undermine my claim that thought experimentingis mental
modeling. Mental modeling does not require introspective access to an image in the
"mind's eye". It only requires the ability to reason by means of an analog model.
The relationship between a mental model and what has been called "mentalimagery"
is something that still needs to be worked out.
Advocates of mental modeling argue that the original capacity developed as a way
of simulating possible ways of maneuvering within the physical environment. It
would be highly adaptive to possess the ability to anticipatethe environmentand pos-
sible outcomes of actions, so it likely that many organisms have the capacity for men-
tal modeling. It is also likely that humans have the possibility of creating models
from both perception and description. Additionally, there is mounting evidence from
neuropsychology that the perceptual system plays a significant role in imaginative
reasoning (See, e.g., Farah 1988). Again, this makes sense from an evolutionary per-
spective. The visual cortex is one of the oldest and most highly developed regions of
the brain. As Roger Shephard, a psychologist who has done extensive research on vi-
sual cognition, has put it, perceptual mechanisms "have, throughevolutionaryeons,
deeply internalized an intuitive wisdom about the way things transformin the world.
Because this wisdom is embodied in a perceptual system that antedates,by far, the
emergence of language and mathematics, imagination is more akin to visualizing than
to talking or to calculating to oneself' (1988, p.180). The point is that contraryto the
picture philosophers have constructed of the inferior status of visual modes of think-
ing, the visual cortex is a more highly evolved portion of the brain (Wimsatt 1990).
Although the original ability to envision by mental modeling may have developed as
a way of simulating possible courses of action in the world, it is highly plausible that,
as human brains have developed, this ability has been "bentto the service of creative
thought"(Shephard 1988, p.180).
In the domain of research into narrativecomprehension the mental models hypoth-
esis is that in understandingthe meaning of a narrative,the linguistic expressions as-
sist the reader/listenerin constructing a mental model and in reasoning about the situ-
ation depicted by the narrativethrough this model. Johnson-Lairdin psycholinguis-
tics and others in formal semantics, linguistics and AI have proposed a theory of "dis-
course models" for narratives. The central idea is that "discourse models make ex-
plicit the structurenot of sentences but of situations as we perceive or imagine them"
(Johnson-Laird1989, p.471). The principal tenets of the theory are: (1) the referent
of a discourse is the situation the discourse describes; (2) the meaning of a discourse,
i.e. the set of all possible situations it could describe, comprises both the linguistic
representationand the mental mechanisms for constructingand runningmental mod-
els; and (3) if a discourse has at least one model that can be embedded in a model of
the world it is judged to be true (p.475).
It is true that, as John Norton (1991) has pointed out, extremely colorful narratives
may include highly specific details. Ratherthan being "irrelevant",as he main-
tains, though, these details usually serve to reinforce crucial aspects of the experi-
ment. For example, in one version of the chest, or "elevator",experiment,
Einstein depicts the physicist as being drugged and then waking up in a box. This
colorful detail serves to reinforce the point that the observer could not have known
before entering the chest if he were falling in outer space or sitting in a gravitation-
al field. It also reinforces the condition that the observer cannot know whether or
not there are gravitational sources around.
We can only speculate about what goes on in the mind of the scientist who devises
the original thought experiment. Scientists have rarely been asked to discuss the de-
tails of how they formulated these experiments. However, reports of thought experi-
ments are presented, customarily, in the form of narratives. Because the thought-ex-
perimental narrativesare what we have access to and because they are a central form
of effecting conceptual change within a scientific community, I propose to examine
how the narrativesfunction. From that analysis we can infer that the original experi-
ment involves a similar form of reasoning. To explicate the notion that thought exper-
imenting is simulative model-based reasoning, we need to determine:(1) how a narra-
Idealization is not, however, the most salient dimension of the reasoning done with
thought experiments. It is more significant that the thought experiment is understood
to representa prototypical occurrence of a situation. This is what gives the outcomes
their generality and contributesto the impact of the experiment. Although the thought
experimenterconstructs a single model, its significance for a whole class of phenome-
na and situations is grasped in its execution. The thought-experimentalmodel has as-
pects that are generic and others that are highly specific. For example, in Galileo's
thought experiments with falling bodies any objects will do. The color and shape of
the objects are not significant. The specific weights are also not salient, but that one
object weighs more than the other needs to be specified. Most importantly,in thought
experimenting the causal sequences are usually highly specific.
4.2 Thought Experiments and Real-world Experiments
Notes
1I acknowledge and appreciate the supportof NSF Scholars Awards DIR 8821422
and DIR 9111779 in conducting the research discussed here.
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