The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person versus Third Person Approaches

Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1):128-159 (2007)
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Abstract

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint.

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Kirk Ludwig
Indiana University, Bloomington

References found in this work

Naming and Necessity: Lectures Given to the Princeton University Philosophy Colloquium.Saul A. Kripke - 1980 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
Studies in the way of words.Herbert Paul Grice - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Individualism and the mental.Tyler Burge - 1979 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1):73-122.
Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 1980 - Philosophy 56 (217):431-433.

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