• Braitenberg vehicles (robotics, neural control and sensing systems) (some have actually been built)
• Doomsday argument (anthropic principle)
• Infinite monkey theorem (probability, infinity)
• Halting problem (limits of computability)
• The Lady, or the Tiger? (human nature)^[5]
• Turing machine (limits of computability)
• Dining Philosophers (computer science)

[

Notes

1. ^ Cohen, Martin, "Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments", Blackwell, (Oxford), 2005, p5.
2. ^ Cohen, Martin, "Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments", Blackwell, (Oxford), 2005, p55-56.
3. ^ Ackermann, F., "Philosophical Knowledge", pp.342-345 in Dancy, J. & Sosa, E. (eds.), A Companion to Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, (Oxford), 1993, pp.342-343.
4. ^ Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (1996), History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 315, Routledge, ISBN 0415131596.
5. ^ While the problem presented in this short story's scenario is not unique, it is extremely unusual. Most thought experiments are intentionally (or, even, sometimes unintentionally) skewed towards the inevitable production of a particular solution to the problem posed; and this happens because of the way that the problem and the scenario are framed in the first place. In the case of The Lady, or the Tiger?, the way that the story unfolds is so "end-neutral" that, at the finish, there is no "correct" solution to the problem. Therefore, all that one can do is to offer one's own innermost thoughts on how the account of human nature that has been presented might unfold ? according to one's own experience of human nature ? which is, obviously, the purpose of the entire exercise. The extent to which the story can provoke such an extremely wide range of (otherwise equipollent) predictions of the participants' subsequent behaviour is one of the reasons the story has been so popular over time.

[

Significant articles about thought experiments or thought experimentation

• Dennett, D.C., "Intuition Pumps", pp.180-197 in Brockman, J., The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster, (New York), 1995. [2]
• Galton, F., "Statistics of Mental Imagery", Mind, Vol.5, No.19, (July 1880), pp.301-318.
• Hempel, C.G., "Typological Methods in the Natural and Social Sciences", pp.155-171 in Hempel, C.G. (ed.), Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science, The Free Press, (New York), 1965.
• Kuhn, T. "A Function for Thought Experiements", in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 240--
• Mach, E., "On Thought Experiments", pp.134-147 in Mach, E., Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry, D. Reidel Publishing Co., (Dordrecht), 1976. [Translation of Erkenntnis und Irrtum (5th edition, 1926.].
• Popper, K., "On the Use and Misuse of Imaginary Experiments, Especially in Quantum Theory", pp.442-456, in Popper, K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Harper Torchbooks, (New York), 1968.
• Rescher, N., "Thought Experiment in Pre-Socratic Philosophy", pp.31-41 in Horowitz, T. & Massey, G.J. (eds.), Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield, (Savage), 1991.
• Witt-Hansen, J., "H.C. ?rsted, Immanuel Kant and the Thought Experiment", Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol.13, (1976), pp.48-65.
• Jacques, V., Wu, E., Grosshans, F., Treussart, F., Grangier, P. Aspect, A., & Roch, J. (2007). Experimental Realization of Wheeler's Delayed-Choice Gedanken Experiment, Science, 315, p. 966-968. [3]

[

Books about thought experiments

• Brown, J.R., The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences, Routledge, (London), 1993.
• Browning, K.A. (ed.), Nowcasting, Academic Press, (London), 1982.
• Cohen, Martin, "Wittgenstein's Beetle and Other Classic Thought Experiments", Blackwell (Oxford) 2005
• Cohnitz, D., Gedankenexperimente in der Philosophie, Mentis Publ., (Paderborn, Germany), 2006.
• Craik, K.J.W., The Nature of Explanation, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), 1943.
• Cushing, J.T., Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation Between Philosophy and Scientific Theories, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), 1998.
• DePaul, M. & Ramsey, W. (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, (Lanham), 1998.
• Gendler, T.S., Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary Cases, Garland, (New York), 2000.
• Gendler, T.S. & Hawthorne, J., Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 2002.
• H?ggqvist, S., Thought Experiments in Philosophy, Almqvist & Wiksell International, (Stockholm), 1996.
• Hanson, N.R., Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), 1962.
• Harper, W.L., Stalnaker, R. & Pearce, G. (eds.), Ifs: Conditionals, Belief, Decision, Chance, and Time, D. Reidel Publishing Co., (Dordrecht), 1981.
• Hesse, M.B., Models and Analogies in Science, Sheed and Ward, (London), 1963.
• Holyoak, K.J. & Thagard, P., Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, (Cambridge), 1995.
• Horowitz, T. & Massey, G.J. (eds.), Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield, (Savage), 1991.
• Kahn, H., Thinking About the Unthinkable, Discus Books, (New York), 1971.
• Kuhne, U., Die Methode des Gedankenexperiments, Suhrkamp Publ., (Frankfurt/M, Germany), 2005.
• Leatherdale, W.H., The Role of Analogy, Model and Metaphor in Science, North-Holland Publishing Company, (Amsterdam), 1974.
• Roese, N.J. & Olson, J.M. (eds.), What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, (Mahwah), 1995.
• Shanks, N. (ed.), Idealization IX: Idealization in Contemporary Physics (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Volume 63), Rodopi, (Amsterdam), 1998.
• Shick, T. & Vaugn, L., Doing Philosophy: An Introduction through Thought Experiments (Second Edition), McGraw Hill, (New York), 2003.
• Sorensen, R.A., Thought Experiments, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1992.
• Tetlock, P.E. & Belkin, A. (eds.), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, Princeton University Press, (Princeton), 1996.
• Thomson, J.J. {Parent, W. (ed.)}, Rights, Restitution, and Risks: Essays in Moral Theory, Harvard University Press, (Cambridge), 1986 .
• Vosniadou, S. & Ortony. A. (eds.), Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, Cambridge University Press, (Cambridge), 1989.
• Wilkes, K.V., Real People: Personal Identity without Thought Experiments, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1988.

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See also

[

External links

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/
• [4] Philosophy Bites podcast: Nigel Warburton interviews Julian Baggini on Thought Experiments
• Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments Short essay by S. Abbas Raza of 3 Quarks Daily
• Thought experiment generator, an entertaining visual aid to running your own thought experiment
• Articles on Thought Experiments in the PhilSci Archive, an electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science.

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