Thought Experiments

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""Contents""; ""Introduction""; ""1. Our Most Curious Device""; ""I: The Instrument of Choice""; ""II: Scientific Thought Experiments""; ""III: The Bridge to Philosophical Thought Experiments""; ""IV: Analytic Philosophy's Commitment to Thought Experiment""; ""2. Scepticism About Thought Experiments""; ""I: Introspection on the Sly?""; ""A. The Internal Horizon""; ""B. Complaints About Introspection""; ""C. The Parallel Plight of Thought Experiments""; ""II: A Repackaged Appeal to Ordinary Language?""; ""A. How the Appeal to Ordinary Language Is Supposed to Work"" ""B. Strong Scepticism About the Appeal to Ordinary Language""""C. Moderate Scepticism About the Appeal to Ordinary Language""; ""D. Semantic Descent to Thought Experiments""; ""III: Thought Experiments and the Dilemma of Informativeness""; ""3. Mach and Inner Cognitive Africa""; ""I: Instinctive Knowledge""; ""II: The Continuum of Cognitive Bargain Hunters""; ""III: Mach's Response to the Problem of Informativeness""; ""IV: Appraisal of Mach""; ""A. What Mach Got Right""; ""B. What Mach Got Wrong""; ""4. The Wonder of Armchair Inquiry""; ""I: The Pseudoanomaly""; ""A. Modal Gap Illusions"" ""B. How Thought Experiments Yield Modal Conclusions""""II: Positive Theories of Armchair Inquiry""; ""A. The Recollection Model""; ""B. The Transformation Model""; ""C. The Homuncular Model""; ""D. The Rearrangement Model""; ""III: The Cleansing Model""; ""A. How Thought Experiment Corrects Imbalances""; ""B. Theoretical and Practical Irrationality""; ""IV: An Eclectic View of the Mechanics of Thought Experiment""; ""5. Kuhntradictions""; ""I: Kuhn on the Received Opinion""; ""II: Misfits""; ""III: The Left Hand of Logic""; ""IV: Truth or Dare?"" ""A. The Incoherence of Incoherent Concepts""""B. Violation of Logical Conservatism""; ""V: Reconstruction of Kuhn's Error""; ""A. The Guts of Paradox""; ""B. Conflationary Factors""; ""C. The Phenomenology of Inconsistency""; ""D. Counteranalysis of Kuhn's Cases""; ""E. Taxonomic Prospects""; ""6. The Logical Structure of Thought Experiment""; ""I: Attributing Thought Experiments""; ""II: Thought Experiments as Alethic Refuters""; ""A. Necessity Refuters""; ""B. The Five Responses to the Quintet""; ""C. Summary of Necessity Refuters""; ""D. Possibility Refuters"" ""E. Summary of Possibility Refuters""""III: The Identity Conditions for Thought Experiments""; ""IV: An Extension to Ordinary Experiments""; ""V: The Big Picture""; ""7. Conflict Vagueness and Precisification""; ""I: General Features of Vagueness""; ""II: Dueling Definitions""; ""A. The Psychology of Conflict Vagueness""; ""B. How Conflict Vagueness Creates the Mirage of Local Incoherence""; ""C. Extensional Conflict Vagueness""; ""D. Intensional Conflict Vagueness""; ""III: Application of the Quintet Schema""; ""IV: Conceptual Reform""; ""V: Eliminative Reactions to Conflict Vagueness""