Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Thought Experiment As An Interdisciplinary Pedagogy, Sharon M. Kaye

2018 Faculty Bibliography

The thesis of this paper is that thought experiments provide an especially powerful way to frame a class discussion. They work for students for the same reason that they have worked for great geniuses (such as Einstein) through the ages—namely, because they are interdisciplinary. Competing rationalist and empiricist accounts of how thought experiments work suggest that they will engage both rationally- and empirically-minded students. Examples of student responses to thought experiments confirm that they bring out interestingly diverse ways of thinking. Concern that interdisciplinary pedagogy makes genuine communication impossible has led some theorists to insist on a methodological pluralism that …