There is a certain purity in the scientific method (though you wouldn’t believe so in our current political climate) in the way that we compare objective observations and measurements to predictions from a theory in order to look for ground truth.  If you can’t prove a hypothesis of yours with this predictive power, then it doesn’t enter the canon of accepted scientific fact and it remains in a Schrodinger-type state until it can be.

This methodology seems obvious to us today, but for most of human civilisation this was not the case.  The rigour in thinking that blossomed during the enlightenment remains a relatively recent development, but one that has transformed our world for the better.  Even though there are a number of postmodernist voices who will try to argue otherwise, the bare bones of our modern-day society are undergirded by the results of scientific thinking.

Unfortunately, there are many fields of study that aren’t able to benefit from the cold objectivity that is afforded to scientific endeavours.  Philosophy is the obvious one and perhaps the most important of this type.  Philosophy is a wide-ranging discipline that aims to tackle fundamental topics of knowledge, reality, existence, ethics and a thousand others.  The vast majority of which are (for the most part) out of the reach of the scientific method because it all happens behind the veil of our minds - in brains that we barely understand at all.

So how do we search for and find philosophical truth?

Dialogue

If you look back through the history of the discipline, you’ll find that philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle and Plato seeded the investigation through dialogue.  They would engage in wide-ranging conversations with people to try to understand how the world works and our place in it.  Much of it was rhetorical in nature, asking the listener to ponder certain ideas or arguments in real-time.  These conversations were much more engaging and challenging than your typical conversations around the braai, and they attempted to ask and answer some of the most difficult questions known to man, most of which remain unanswered to this day.

What made those dialogues so influential though was the way that they chipped away at intuitions, isolated potential assumptions, challenged traditional values and forced people to question why they believed what they believed.  In other words, they applied a rudimentary version of the scientific method inside the mind of the person they were speaking with, rather than in the physical world.  They swapped test tubes for neurons.

Fast forward two millennia and we still rely on the same methodology when dealing with intangible truths.  Instead, we don’t have to solely rely on dialogues any more, we can write our ideas on paper and share them asynchronously, at scale.  So the dialogues have become what we call ’thought experiments’.  The philosopher will describe a carefully controlled situation and invite the reader to imagine themselves in it and see where their intuitions take them.

Thought Experiments

To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, here is the stock-standard 'trolley problem' thought experiment that remains one of the most accessible entry points into ethics for those from outside the field:

'There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:

1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.

2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?'

The situation is fictional, of course, but by carefully controlling the variables (how many people?, can they move?, what kind of lever is it?, who are the people?, etc.) the experiment can draw out intuitions about how we value human life.  There is no right answer here, but if we both answer the question differently, that is the foundation for a debate about an ethical truth that we want to try and uncover.

Thought experiments like this are everywhere in modern philosophy and are an important component of our sense-making apparatus.  For many in the field (including myself) these can be remarkably fun.  Intellectually, this kind of experimentation is incredibly mentally stimulating and thus enjoyable.  Not only that, but they have also been incredibly influential and useful for the field.  Tremendous intellectual progress has been made because of their usage and I don’t want to ignore or understate that.

However, when you only have a hammer to solve your problem, everything looks like a nail.

The Dangers

Thought experiments have their drawbacks, beyond the inherent subjectivity and I don’t think that philosophy is taking those dangers seriously enough.  It is well established that we should be cautious of relying on our intuitions because they are tainted by self-interest, economic incentives, brainwashing, tacit influence and a thousand other things.  They have been notoriously misguided throughout our history and over-reliance has led to some serious moral blind spots.

So any tool that aims to draw out certain intuitions must be handled with extreme care.

The best articulation of this danger comes from Daniel Dennett’s book ‘Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking’.  He shows that when we take common thought experiments and change certain variables (in morally arbitrary ways) we can find our intuitions changing drastically - casting doubt over the thought experiment’s usefulness.  Throughout the book he does it time and time again and, in doing so, really convinced me that we often are hoodwinked by skilled writers who are able to guide our imagination towards their desired conclusion without us realising it.

We have to read critically and slowly, with a dose of skepticism, if we are to avoid these traps.  This is not easy to do and it takes tremendous focus, but it’s crucial if we are to make real progress.  Dennett writes that if we are to take a philosopher seriously we should be reading every assertion and assumption with the lens of ‘Is this true?’  Don’t let linguistic choices trip up your logical radar for the underlying point being made.

Thought experiments are not a panacea and we shouldn’t see them as such.

But Barry, I’m not a Philosopher…

I’d argue that you are, even if you don’t know it, but that’s a post for another day.  Regardless, this is still relevant to you.  Here’s how:

Every single day, the war of ideas rages on in our society.  Marketers, politicians, writers, thinkers, con-men, religions, Instagram models, bloggers (sigh) are trying to influence you.  They have a message that they are trying to convey to win themselves status, success, money or self-worth.  They run thought experiments with you, playing on human psychology to encourage you to make a certain decision.  You can’t escape thought experiments - they are ubiquitous.

What you can do however is take steps to strengthen your mental immune system, to make it easier to spot poor arguments, ulterior motives or blatant misrepresentation.

• Be humble about that which you don’t know.  Don’t just grab the nearest opinion and take that to be yours.

• Read/listen critically, asking yourself at every stage - is this true?  Fact check it with other sources.

• Don’t over-rely on your intuitions.  Deploy some skepticism to push back on your instincts and kick the tyres a bit.

• Acknowledge that so much of what you believe is on shaky foundations.  Be honest with yourself about what you’ve actually thought through and what you’ve just adopted from your parents, peers or someone online.

• Become a connoisseur of the mistaken beliefs you’ve had in the past.  Examine them ruthlessly and dispassionately to figure out what went awry.

• Don’t fall for ‘deepities’ - things that seem important, true and profound, but only accomplish that effect through linguistic ambiguity or vagueness.

Again, this stuff isn’t easy.  But in a world drenched in fake news and (to be honest) complete intellectual chaos, it’s crucial.  The sooner you realise which thought experiments are impacting the way you think, the better chance you have of avoiding the moral harms of the worst ones.

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