From Imagination to Map: Non-Discursive Foundations of Thought Experi ment

The article deals with the epistemology of thought experiments. Discussions on thought experiments usually focus on two points: the ability of a thought experiment to produce new knowledge and the possibility of replacing a laboratory experiment with a mental one. In this context, two theoretical positions stand out. The first assumes that a thought experiment is not a material procedure and therefore cannot produce new knowledge if the latter is understood as empirical data (sensory experience). Accordingly, a thought experiment is simply reasoning, a logical argument capable of providing an assessment of a theory for logical consistency, but not capable of performing the main function of a laboratory experiment - to provide access to reality (empirical data). An alternative view of a thought experiment focuses on its similarity to a laboratory experiment in terms of goals and design and defends the possibility of using a thought experiment as a full-fledged methodological replacement for a laboratory experiment, which is crucial for those areas of knowledge where the use of laboratory experiments is difficult or impossible. The discursive (argument) / experimental (sensory experience) dichotomy, which is formed by the noted theoretical positions, seems unproductive for considering a thought experiment since it focuses on the discursive (final) component of a thought experiment and its - supposed by the term - structural-functional similarity with laboratory experimental procedures. At the same time, the peculiarity of the procedural aspect of a thought experiment is overlooked because the persuasiveness and strength of its arguments rely on ocular representation no less than on the logical structure extracted from this representation. Questions about what exactly is imagined in a thought experiment and what the mechanism for choosing details for the formation of a working (“imaginary experimental”) representation is can shed light on the epistemological status of a thought experiment and its methodological possibilities. A thought experiment is very close to a cartographic operation: the researcher sketches a mental map, collecting in their imagination an ocular representation of an essential invariant of reality. This operation includes the non-discursive phase of imagination and the discursive phase of the articulation of the invariant -the map includes sensory fabric and rules, where the sensory fabric is a product of the imagination and the rules presented in it are judgements (discourse). From this point of view, a thought experiment is a socialization of the imagination - a transition from an always individual imaginary representation to a discursively meaningful representation, i.e. one that is convenient for extracting a formal invariant (rule, contradiction, algorithm, etc.) and correlates with the theoretical standards in force for a given field of knowledge (a paradigm in the sense of T. Kuhn).

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