Craft and StructureVery hardTwo philosophers on thought experiments
Craft and Structure practice question
Text 1
The thought experiment is philosophy's laboratory, free of charge: imagine the runaway trolley or the falling elevator, vary one detail at a time, and watch which intuitions survive. Galileo refuted Aristotle on falling bodies without dropping a thing.
Text 2
Galileo's imagined weights worked because physics answered back — the scenario was chained to constraints the world enforces. Cut those chains, as fanciful cases often do, and the method manufactures intuitions about situations so underspecified that our verdicts report only the story's framing, not any truth.
Which choice best describes the relationship between the texts?
- A. Text 2 contends that the method Text 1 celebrates succeeds only where its scenarios stay answerable to real-world constraints.Correct
- B. Text 2 denies that thought experiments have ever influenced science.
- C. Both texts conclude that laboratory experiments are obsolete.
- D. Text 1 argues thought experiments are unreliable, while Text 2 defends them.
Answer: A. Text 2 contends that the method Text 1 celebrates succeeds only where its scenarios stay answerable to real-world constraints.
Text 1 praises imagined cases as cheap laboratories; Text 2 grants their power but adds the constraint: they work when physics-like limits discipline the imagining, and mislead when scenarios float free. That is a conditional endorsement.
Why the other answers are wrong
- B. Text 2 denies that thought experiments have ever influenced science.
- Text 2 opens by crediting a famous physics thought experiment.
- C. Both texts conclude that laboratory experiments are obsolete.
- Neither text suggests real experiments are obsolete.
- D. Text 1 argues thought experiments are unreliable, while Text 2 defends them.
- This reverses the texts: Text 1 is the celebrant, Text 2 the qualifier.
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