« Look Now, Pay Later | Main | Carl Schmitt at Nuremberg »
thought experiments
The "thought experiment" is among the most used and best loved tools in the philosophic shed.
Thought experiments have "heuristic value." That means they help to explain or test ideas, situations, problems. Max Weber's "ideal types" are thought experiments; Marx's description of the process of capital in _Capital_ is an ideal type / thought experiment.
But the thought experiment has a very broad and ancient usage. If I mention a few, it's not because I don't think people reading this already know about them. I'm just trying to make a point.
Of course Socrates' cave analogy in _The Republic_ is a kind of thought experiment. But in general, whenever Socrates takes a specific question that troubles common sense -- like, what is friendship or what is fealty, or justice, or some other 'value' -- he quite frequently employs a 'thought experiment' that is designed to 'raise' the discussion away from specifics and in the direction of more abstract considerations of principle.
Then, of course, there's the whole social contract tradition -- such a 'continent' in political theory! One can't navigate around that 'horn'! -- which is nothing but a reflection on the this-sidedness and worldliness of a particular thought experiment; that is, what if there were no laws, no norms, no rules; what would happen? Hows would humans interact? Do you want 'norms' to give you a 'yes' or a 'no' about what to do or not do? Get thee to a state of nature! Go and blush behind this veil of ignorance!
The tradition of thought experiments lives a false and shadowy existence in the netherworld of "big question" debates about morality. Let's say you're on a boat and there's five people, and there's only enough water for two of those people. If the water currently available is shared equally, all five will die over the next three days; whereas if the water is hoarded by two of the five, chances for survival tripple -- to nine days. What's the 'right' thing to do? That's a thought experiment. Note that it is no less an experiment for occurring in 'thought.'
Imagine the following: Someone is driving through Pennsylvania and all the lights are out. This person pulls into a gas station to buy some gas and some gum, but here, too, the kind of darkness that points to a power failure. The gas pumps don't work. Hoping to get some gum, the driver walks into the appropriately small mini-mart. It is dark but the door is open. The customer sees that all electricity has been cut. By chance, the guy running the cash register -- the only person working there this late at night -- has fallen dead of a heart attack. He died before he could close the cash register. Many hundreds of dollars do now spill out the cash register. The customer is reasonably convinced that no surveillance cameras are operating. In addition to the gum, it would be riskless to stuff one's pockets with many hundreds of dollars.
Two questions: First, what should the customer do? Second question: What do we predict the customer will do? It's a thought experiment!
Let us further imagine that the individuals going into the blacked-out convenience store in Pennsylvania are motivated by pure philosophic principles: one a Platonist, the other a Humean, another a Sadist, someone else a Hobbist, another a Rawlsian, and so on. What would different individuals motivated by competing philosophic approaches do? What would they think? How would they reason?
By John Ransom | December 20, 2005 in Postmodernism | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83452467869e200d834660f1153ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference thought experiments:
Comments
Hmmm . . . That's much too hard for me to even think about. And in any event, I've never read Rawls or de Sade and what reading I've done of the others is long ago. But one might ask a different question. Instead of wondering about the actions of people committed to doctrines promulgated by those worthys, one might ask what those worthys themselves would do. Would they act according to (what one might imagine is required by) their doctrine, or would they somehow act otherwise.
A friend of mine who went to St. Johns (of Great Books fame) told me that in his senior oral exam he was asked: If St. Augustine had seen Hamlet, would he have laughed in the right places? I don't know how my friend answered the question.
Posted by: Bill Benzon | Dec 20, 2005 4:45:36 PM
Usually, I hate comments that refer to one's own blog -- but this is a comment referring to my blog, so I'm sorry in advance. But since I did a series of posts at Limited Inc, to ventilate my own dislike for thought experiments and link to other philosophers who have written about philosophy's thought experiment inflation problem, I thought this might be of interest. My objection is related to doing a bit of geneology about the term, thought experiment -- how it entered into the vocabulary, via Claude Bernard and Ernst Mach, just as the experiment, in science, was changing. The scientific experiment was transformed by the new crossing of statistics with the various natural sciences. That meant that experimental design changed. But even so, in science, the experiment itself had a performative moment -- and even in cases where thought experiments were incorporated into science, analogous experiments were then designed, so that the thought experiment did not, of itself, play a deciding role.
By contrast, most thought experiments in philosophy are designed to elude a performative moment. Ironically, this inverses the experimental spirit -- instead of taking the researcher out into the world, to check suppositions, it takes the researcher from the world into a verbal labyrinth of the imperformative.
Anyway, I thought I'd blow my own horn and refer you to these posts on Limited Inc., starting from http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004/07/bollettino-li-has-always-been.html, and going through a post about the prestige of the experiment in Victorian culture, here: http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004/07/bollettino.html and comments about Mach and the performativity criteria here: tp://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004/07/bollettino-in-his-comments-to-my.html
Posted by: roger | Dec 20, 2005 5:28:30 PM
You can tell a helluva lot about a person from when they laugh during a film or performance. But maybe it's the existence of a pattern more than the consistent nailing of "right moments" that reveals something about their disposition? I mean, sometimes it's the precise wrong moments that are most funny (I'm not sure there's a universal standard, to laugh along with Harold Bloom, for instance.)
Posted by: Matt | Dec 20, 2005 8:04:27 PM
Gah! Your operational definition of 'thought experiment' seems to be 1. totally idiosyncratic and 2. so broad as to encompass any kind of imaginative enterprise. Marx and Weber do not do thought experiments, they do abstraction. You also omit to mention the best and most important thought experiment probably ever, Einstein's thought experiments which yielded his theory of relativity. Gah! again.
Posted by: mark | Dec 21, 2005 12:51:30 AM
It has been awhile since I last read Weber (and rightly so), but his concept of the ideal type is somewhat more complex than you suggest, Mark, to the extent that while, in the first instance, it may be an abstraction, it is not limited to such. Indeed, Weber uses the example of why modern capitalism failed to develop anywhere but in Western Europe on the basis of his ideal type of modern capitalism. This strategy is pursued not only in the economic sociology, but also in the religious sociology. The construction of an ideal type allows for the work of an imaginary 'if...then' to take place.
Posted by: Craig | Dec 21, 2005 1:03:27 AM
Good points Craig, but I'd highlight the difference between Weber's use of ideal types and Marx's use of 'determinate abstractions' which are abstractions corresponding to a social reality within the particular society being studied. Thus the careful choice of where to begin methodologically in the Introduction to the Grundrisse (he chooses 'abstract labour'). We can legitimately use the abstraction 'labour in general' when studying capitalism because there labour itself becomes abstract, each worker's capacity to work fully fungible. Turning to Weber, it's not that modern capitalism could develop only in Western Europe (America features large in The Prot Ethic too: recall how important Ben Franklin's words on saving are in Chapter 2); it's more that he's interested in why it develops in Northern Europe and that say Florentine society, despite it's wealth, becomes capitalist only much later. The answer as we know for Weber is Calvinism. I've been reading his very useful 'Anticritical Last Word on the Spirit of Capitalism', his reply to his critics (American Journal of Sociology vol 83 no 5, avaliable via JSTOR). It's good on how he formulated the ideal type of 'the entrepreneur' and how correspondingly not every individual entrepreneur will fit it; rather each will show some or other of its characteristics. Now one could trace the different types of abstraction in Weber and Marx back to the different philosophies of Kant and Hegel but that's another story...
Posted by: YH | Dec 21, 2005 6:32:27 AM
A Rufian would shoot the guy who used to run the cash register, emptying a full clip into his lifeless body and reloading like Master Chief, because he could finally do some serious video game roleplay without felony charges.
A Deanian would see in the dead figure an encounter with the Real, and would leave the cash in order to stave off the appropriation of the Real to the (monetary) Symbolic order. Electric power, which had been repressed, would soon return.
A Christiean would contemplate the empty register and the lifeless body, noting that Blanchot said it best: "If death is vain, so too is the expression of death, including the one that believes it says so, and disappoints by saying so."
A Kotskoan would, assuming it's Tuesday, hate the entire thought experiment. Among hating other things, of course.
[Anyone want to finish with the rest of the LS contributor list?]
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Dec 21, 2005 8:33:09 AM
I'm curious about your choice of philosophical types. In truth they would all feel sadness, I suspect (to the degree that analytic philosophers are so capable). (And if by "Sadist" you meant a real reader of de Sade, not just some Abu Ghraib jarhead or contractor.) And being philosophical, that is to say, generally thoughtful people, probably do the decent thing (or not, depending on prevailing winds and whims). But only an analytic-type would have the audacity to insist he or she would always do "the right" (or lawful) thing. I can't imagine any of your examples breaking the law on philosophical grounds really, but perhaps someone else can?
Posted by: liminal | Dec 21, 2005 10:44:55 AM
Bupkis would say nothing, walk back out, place an anonymous call and later recall an arresting poem. Alph would write a brilliant 30-page screed on the spot, against those subtle racists who would see in the dead clerk a mere victim, one whose life was always prone to violence. She would then turn to Bupkis's poem. A would pound her fists and swear and smoke a cigarette. CR would blame it on John Holbo. YH might quote from memory, but first quietly to, and for himself.
Posted by: anon | Dec 21, 2005 10:54:06 AM
Benzon writes:
A friend of mine who went to St. Johns (of Great Books fame) told me that in his senior oral exam he was asked: If St. Augustine had seen Hamlet, would he have laughed in the right places? I don't know how my friend answered the question.
[end Benzon]
There are no 'right' places to laugh at in Hamlet. Everyone gets to choose.
I look forward to checking out Roger's already-existing comments on the thought experiment and thinking more about it on the basis of that. But I don't agree with the following: "most thought experiments in philosophy are designed to elude a performative moment. Ironically, this inverses the experimental spirit -- instead of taking the researcher out into the world, to check suppositions, it takes the researcher from the world into a verbal labyrinth of the imperformative." That doesn't sound fair. It's important not to overrate the importance of the so-called 'world.' But in any event, we can check your criticism agaisnt the thought experiment offered. In the world as it is usually experienced, the lights wouldn't be out, the electricity wouldn't be down, the guy at the cash register wouldn't be dead. The customer would buy the gas and the gum and leave. But how does that help us clarify the moral stand of the agent involved?
Mark writes:
Marx and Weber do not do thought experiments, they do abstraction. You also omit to mention the best and most important thought experiment probably ever, Einstein's thought experiments which yielded his theory of relativity. Gah! again.
[end mark]
No, they do thought experiments. Thought experiments are necessarily 'abstract.' For instance, there's not many places in the world where Locke's "state of nature" exists. And: I don't see why I get a gah for not mentioning a prominent thought experiment.
Craig writes: "The construction of an ideal type allows for the work of an imaginary 'if...then' to take place."
[end craig]
No, that's not right, or at least not complete. An 'ideal type' takes a partricular element, feature, or 'economy' (of forces) out of the environment it is actually found in. This is done, obviously, in thought. The particular dynamic to be studied is, as it were, freed of everything empirical, and then looked at in terms of how it would work if it were left to its own developmental tendencies. Marx's _Capital_ can best be understood in this sense: he's not describing how capitalism functions in its natural environment, where it is subject to all sorts of countervailing and encouraging influences. Rather, he is describing a 'pure' kind of capitalism. The value of this procedure is that one is able to see the fundamental forces and tendencies at work in the thing to be studied.
YH recommends what looks like a very valuable article in this context and I am going to go get it. Thanks for the reference.
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Dec 21, 2005 10:54:09 AM
I guess the important thing about thought experiments is whether they open up thought or close it down, whether they are imaginative and reflective in a critical way of 'the world' or whether they just reproduce the structural features of that 'world' as taken-for-granted assumptions. To use Ernst Bloch's terms we might distinguish a cold-stream of thought experiment - "imagine there is a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking bomb" - from a warm-stream - "Imagine a world without money". Starting to sound like John Lennon here, so I'll stop.
Posted by: YH | Dec 21, 2005 11:10:56 AM
Excellent distinction, YH.
Posted by: Matt | Dec 21, 2005 11:38:29 AM
I'm a bit confused: I make a comment about Weber's ideal types, and I'm hit with Marx not once, but twice! Maybe I've missed something along the way, but, well, you know, I thought it was possible to separate a discussion of the bourgeois Marx (Max) from the radical Marx (Karl).
While both proceed through abstraction -- there is no way to deny this -- their method of abstraction, not to mention what they seek to do with it, is entirely different. The question that most interests Weber, "Why did modern industrial capitalism develop in the wester Europe, even if the material conditions were present earlier and in greater supply in other places at other times?", is not a question that interests Marx. The use of mode of production and social formation to isolate 'pure capitalism', 'pure feudalism', 'pure antiquity' and 'pure oriental despotism' is a different method with a different purpose from Weber's ideal types.
To say, "Well, ideal types work in that way, but Marx's social formation does not" is to miss the point! I never made a point about Marx in the first place.
But let's return to Weber. The point of the ideal type of capitalism, for instance, is that it isolates the essential features of modern industrial capitalism. Once so isolated, it is possible then to 'apply' (poor choice of words) the ideal type to empirical reality thus demonstrating the actual path of economic development in the west from the Italian city-states to Calvinist Europe and then to America. On the basis of the this theoretico-empirical argument, Weber is then able to turn around and say, "Well, look, we had the proper material conditions for modern industrial capitalism in both China and India, but it never developed. Why?" He then pushes the empirical data from those places through the ideal type thus showing that it is, apparently, protestantism that gave western Europe the advantage.
Marx's method has nothing to do with this. While both are using theoretico-empirical arguments, one remains ardently materialist while the other remains ardently idealist. The result of what follows from their respective thought experiments is quite clear.
And, yes, the point of Weber's ideal type is as much to demonstrate why we have modern industrial capitalism (a reflection on real empirical reality) as it is to demonstrate why others do not (a reflection on imaginary empirical reality).
Sorry this is rushed and scattered -- off to the grocery store.
Posted by: Craig | Dec 21, 2005 12:03:33 PM
John's right Marx and Weber don't do thought experiments. Somehow we've got onto Marx v Weber and thought experiments as well. Two interesting though incompatible comment-threads. Craig, sorry I conflated yours and Mark's comment in my own. Hope that clarifies things. John again, I'd take issue with the idea that Marx is giving us a pure capitalism in Capital. Off the top of my head Chapter 10 on The Working Day is precisely impure - it's about how the dirty history of struggles over the length of the working day came to create a situation where surplus value is determined by labour time over and above the cost of the reproduction of labour power. The chapter (as with much of the book) is replete with empirical examples of how capitalism operates in Britain, not in Theory. There are abstractions, true, but these are the determinate ones I mentioned - all must have their root in historical actuality or else they are merely the pure concepts of political economy, just what Marx is critiquing by bringing in impure history.
Posted by: YH | Dec 21, 2005 12:24:41 PM
YH writes:
John again, I'd take issue with the idea that Marx is giving us a pure capitalism in Capital. Off the top of my head Chapter 10 on The Working Day is precisely impure - it's about how the dirty history of struggles over the length of the working day came to create a situation where surplus value is determined by labour time over and above the cost of the reproduction of labour power. The chapter (as with much of the book) is replete with empirical examples of how capitalism operates in Britain, not in Theory. There are abstractions, true, but these are the determinate ones I mentioned - all must have their root in historical actuality or else they are merely the pure concepts of political economy, just what Marx is critiquing by bringing in impure history.
[end yh}
Yes, no doubt, Marx deals with 'how capitalism operates in Britain' but he also makes clear that Britain's 'today' is everyone else's 'tomorrow.' Marx isn't interested in just telling everyone what today's capitalism looks like. We've all taken a look, or if we haven't yet, we can, at Engel's 'conditions of the working class in england.' Such a great work by Engels! Such a wonderful piece of 'journalism.' The difference between Engels' excellent and valuable expose and Marx's 'scientific' treatment is that Marx is saying that "nothing that we see capitalists doing to workers is the result of weak moral consciousness. No, it is the result of the unavoidable dynamics of the capitalist economic system itself!"
And so when Marx talks about what happens to the working day, he is certainly talking about what actually happens to people, and why, when they try to restrict the working day or elongate it, etc. But these 'desires' are themselves the result of the working or dysfunction of the capitalist system. Let's say someone says: "It's so immoral or wrong for someone, such as a capitalist, to demand of his workes that they work all week long, including the sabbath." Me, I don't laugh dismissively at that argument. But the capitalist, endorsed, as it were, by Marx, would say: "It's not that I want this or that to happen, it's just that in order to remain competitive, I must get my workers to labor on Sundays and other holidays." Isn't this just the kind of argument that Friedman and company make today?
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Dec 21, 2005 5:12:31 PM
A thought experiment is where you imagine hypothetical conditions and test if your hypothesis works in them. This is ok in physics, but bloody stupid in economics, where it is rife. I don't know about Weber, but Marx doesn't do this: he's a materialist and his abstractions are, as YH says, based in the real importance of average conditions, for example, in capitalism.
I'm glad Locke was brought into this. Locke clearly does assert the state of nature as an actual factual account. Hobbes' state of nature is not factual so much as tendential (this is what tends to happen when society breaks down), and Rousseau's is also factual, anthropological. None of these are thought experiments. Thought experiments are what you do in analytical philosophy. Rawl's veil of ignorance is a thought experiment, in that it has never and cannot ever happen, has no empirical bearing or origin, and yet is supposed to tell us something philosophical. This is anti-materialist and hence a load of old twaddle. It's also what economic rationalists do to similar lack of effect in 'microeconomics'.
Posted by: mark | Dec 21, 2005 10:01:59 PM
Hi John, I think the question of abstration versus concretion (and Marx uses both in Capital) is different from the question of scientific versus moralising analysis (and agreed this latter is one difference between Capital and Engels' CWCiE, though CWCiE is often grimly ironic rather than moralising). Marx is scientific not just in the non-moralising sense but in the first sense of giving us both the concrete history of particular capitalism in Britain and an analysis of capital's necessary features, features that will pertain everywhere, the universal or the logical as it were: et alia's beloved M-C-M' for example. One meaning of Wissenschaft is the comprehension of the relation of particular and universal. But the two are inseparable, and the logical-universal without the particular-historical leaves us just at the stage of the political economists (Smith, Ricardo etc.) and no account of how capital is in fact an historically un-necessary phenomenon; it has an origin and we hope it will have an end.
Mark, having taught Rawls for the first time this term I'm actually not as averse to the Original Position as I'd expected. I think it does give us a sense of what that rather slippery concept 'justice' means, and for Rawls it means bracketting out our particular preferences and narrow self-interests so as to be able to think about common interests and society as a collective endeavour. One way to do this is to imagine that we don't know where we will end up in society given a wholly new redistribution of resources. Justice becomes an idea of substitution - imagining that we might be any other person in society what is the least worst economic outcome we would want for ourselves? The ability to substitute ourselves imaginatively with the other is something which is sadly lacking in our current moral make-up, so I think what he's trying is laudable. True in Rawls the Original Position leads to a left-liberal politics (though some Marxists have argued that in the OP we would actually choose egalitarianism rather than the Difference Principle), but I admire the way that he has thought through the implications of Kant's moral philosophy and its applicability today more rigourously than has anyone else (Habermas even). And in part III of Theory of Justice as well as in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy the Kantianism gets increasingly fleshed out by recourse to Hegel's notion of ethical life, the abstract becomes concrete, which for me is very interesting.
Posted by: YH | Dec 22, 2005 3:23:43 AM
Hey, I think I know what Genet would do.
Does he count as someone of purely philosophic principles?
Posted by: Matt | Dec 22, 2005 9:28:28 AM
The interesting thing about thought experiments as a trope is that emerge as philosophy becomes a scientific discipline. Since myth is, however, embedded in philosophy from the beginning, its continued existence within this supposed science becomes an embarrassment. So the turn to the thought experiment happens -- just as experiments and experimental design (the latter of which is, at best, what thought experiments are) are changing radically in the sciences. The old Baconian experimentum crucis, which is the public image of the experiment, is replaced by experiments designed to show probabilities rather than to discover certainty.
Interestingly, the old tradition of the philosophical "problem" (which is what Locke calls what contemporary philosophers call thought experiments) sometimes does generate experiments. The most famous, I guess, is the Molyneaux problem -- whether, upon restoring sight to a man born blind, the man would be able to recognize colors. Diderot's great account of an operation on a man born blind (which he didn't get to see, actually) got him tossed in the clink.
Things like the Molyneaux problem are right on the edge between myth and science, and I would never deny their power. But I would say that the power resides, partially, in the fact that the performative moment is differed rather than designed. I think Rawls original position is a great liberal myth. But the tendency to call it a thought experiment obscures the source of its allure, which is that one can imagine oneself in that position even though that position is itself socially unimaginable. There is something touching about that -- it is a myth for social engineers in the age of Galbraith's New Industrial State.
Posted by: roger | Dec 22, 2005 11:02:40 AM
Thanks to YH again for referring me to the essay by Weber defending the Protestant Ethic from one of his critics. A very valuable read. YH provides citation above. Two moments in particular struck me.
[begin Weber]
A specific historical structure [such as 'the spirit of capitalism' –jsr] such as that which is at first only ambiguously conceived under this name can only be imbued with conceptual clarity through a synthesis of its individual components as they are revealed in the reality of history . . . . Thus in the reality of the historically given we find particular individual characteristics of a variously mediated, refracted sort, more or less logical and complete, more or less mixed with other heterogeneous characteristics. The most prominent and consequential of these features are selected and combined according to their compatibility. Thus an "ideal type" concept is constructed, an analytical cateogry which the content of an actual cross-section of history approaches only in varying degrees. In fact, every historian employs, consciously or more frequently unconsciously, continuous concepts of this type whenever precise concepts are used. I have repeatedly discussed this point outside these essays without, at least up to now, encountering any disagreement – without, however, somehow deluding myself that through these methodological attempts this not so simple problem is conclusively settled. I have certainly much stronger cause to think quite modestly about my work in this direction up to now. [end Weber]
The clear and straightforward definition of the ideal type is of particular value in the quotation above. Namely, to excerpt:
[begin Weber excerpt]
. . . in the reality of the historically given we find particular individual characteristics of a variously mediated, refracted sort, more or less logical and complete, more or less mixed with other heterogeneous characteristics. The most prominent and consequential of these features are selected and combined according to their compatibility. Thus an "ideal type" concept is constructed, an analytical cateogry which the content of an actual cross-section of history approaches only in varying degrees.
[end Weber excerpt]
In other words, in a way that reminds us very much of Kant, what is found out in the world is frequently polluted by a wide variety of real-world contaminants. Kant's idea is that if we really want to understand how morality works, we have to remove morality from its usual association with the motives of specific individuals. Precisely what so many think is the essence of moral thinking -- locating a particular individual's place and perspective relative to circumstances -- is what Kant wants to save morality *from*. Only then will morality be able to do justice to the human power of law-creation. So too Weber wants to extract a particular world-view from its interaction with the cross-currents of culture that resist or modify it. And this leads me to the second quote, among many, that struck me:
[begin second quotation from Weber]
The specific impact that a particular form of religiosity might possess could only be determined, in my opinion, through the method I followed, and this issue was clearly my primary concern. This impact did not represent merely an acceleration of an already existing psychological disposition. On the contrary, it implied, at least within the worldly sphere, a new spirit. From their religious life, out of their religiously conditioned family traditions and from the religiously influenced life-style of their environment, there emerged a "habitus" among individuals which prepared them in specific ways to live up to the specific demands of early modern capitalism. Schematically expressed, an entrepreneur with an untarnished conscience stepped into the place of the one whose desire for gain was at most tolerated by God – like the Indian merchant of today who must expiate or make up for his *usuraria pravitas*. This entrepreneur was filled with the conviction that Providence had shown him the road to profit not without particular intention. He walked it for the greater glory of God, whose blessing was unequivocally revealed in the multiplication of his profit and possessions. Above all, he could measure his worth not only before men but also before God by success in his occupation, as long as it was realized through legal means.
[end second quotation]
The terms above that in particular draw my attention are 'new spirit' and 'habitus.' I am reminded once again (as I frequently am when I read Weber) of the approach adopted by people like Heidegger and Foucault: like them, Weber is concerned with the efficacy of 'ways of being' that dispose populations to think and act in ways that do or do not conform (whatever particular form they take) with an overriding system's 'purposes.'
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Dec 22, 2005 3:29:31 PM
Very interesting points, Roger and John.
Posted by: YH | Dec 23, 2005 8:53:58 AM
Hobbes' state of nature is not factual so much as tendential (this is what tends to happen when society breaks down),
I think Charles Mills, in The Racial Contract offers an excellent expanation of Hobbes' approach to the social contract--it's a hypothetical thought experiment when applied to Europeans (although they are potentially open to temporary breakdowns), and a historical actuality when he's discussing "the Americas." Whether this confirms Mills thesis that Hobbes is an exemplar of "the racial contract" I leave up to the reader.
I have to agree with Mark, if Marx's abstractions are thought experiments the term is too broad to have much analytical purchase.
Posted by: djw | Dec 23, 2005 12:24:21 PM
And I'm looking forward to this Weber article now that I've read the excerpts. Looks quite helpful.
Posted by: djw | Dec 23, 2005 12:29:11 PM
djw writes: "I have to agree with Mark, if Marx's abstractions are thought experiments the term is too broad to have much analytical purchase."
I don't think 'broad' is an obstacle to analytic value. For instance I saw a star trek episode -- the prequel series. Before you start making fun of me for watching a star trek episode, remember that I'm in Italy and part of the reason I watch it is that the dialogue is simple and it helps me with my Italian. So anyway, a key character is hit by some kind of force and he is dying. He can only be saved if they take some part of his body and clone it, and then quick grow it, and then kill the quick-grown adult and take part of its brain and put it into the brain of the guy who's dying. You know, your usual star trek 'ethical dilemma.' The quick-grown adult doesn't want to die, but the captain of the ship says well, you better get used to it because I'm going to kill you and take part of your brain. And that's what happens. Science fiction often acts as a kind of thought experiment in this way. Has anyone else checked out Doris Lessing's novels along these lines? Such as "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five"? They, too, act as a kind of thought experiment: What would our existential position look like from the point of view of a race that lived much longer and had seen the same sorts of problems come up in lots of different contexts? So, to repeat: I don't know why 'broad' gets in the way of 'analytic value', as long as, of course, we are able to distinguish one intellectual tool from another. Best, John Ransom
Posted by: John S. Ransom | Dec 24, 2005 7:41:46 AM
Post a comment
Please note: comments are published at the discretion of the post's author and will not appear immediately. Do not submit comments more than once.
