Miščević On Thought Experiments

I address two claims that Miščević makes in his book Thought Experiments. The first claim is that literary fictions belong to the broader category of what he terms “Imaginative Enactments in Thought” (IET’s), but are not TE’s properly understood. The second claim is that TE’s are indispensable to analytic philosophy. Both claims appeal to Miščević’s discussion in the opening chapter of what it is for something to be a TE. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) If TE’s are defined in the way that Miščević proposes, then there can in fact be (and indeed are!) works of literary fiction that qualify as TE’s. (2) If TE’s are defi ned in this way and are explained in terms of mental models, then whether there can in fact be analytic philosophy without TE’s depends upon how we understand the relationship between TE’s and counter-factual thinking more broadly construed.