Abstract

In the last decade, philosophers have offered a number of proposals concerning the logical form of hypothetical cases, or thought experiments, as these are used for purposes of testing philosophical claims. In this paper, I discuss what the desiderata for a formal proposal are. Employing a comparison with general philosophy of science, I suggest that one important desideratum is to highlight recurrent patterns of disagreement surrounding cases. I advocate a proposal in propositional modal logic which, I argue, better meets this desideratum than competing proposals. I also sketch how this proposal may be extended into more fine grained analyses, employing counterfactual conditionals yet avoiding certain problems due to so-called "deviant realizations".