Dr Chris Kitson (Queen's University Belfast, IASH Fellow): “Say I Dreamed It in the Workshop”: The Literary Thought Experiment
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
This work in progress paper will introduce my research project on the literary thought experiment. It will begin by discussing the practice of the thought experiment, a practice in philosophy and science whereby the imagining of fictional scenarios seems to provide new and genuine knowledge about the world.
I move on to discuss how thought experiments are controversial in philosophy and philosophy of science, specifically how they pose a particular challenge for empiricist epistemologies, which must confront the question of how the mere contemplation of imagined scenarios can yield genuine knowledge without new sensory experience. The controversial aspect of thought experiments stems from their proximity to fiction, and this is much commented upon in philosophy, with arguments about the cognitive value of thought experiments being taken to have profound implications for the cognitive value of fiction.
This leads to the fundamental claim of my own project, which is that the philosophical debate on thought experiments has been in many ways anticipated by literary texts themselves, which respond to and enact the practice of the thought experiment and which themselves consider its related issues.
I will examine this with reference to H G Wells’s The Time Machine and the theories of Ernst Mach. I will discuss how Wells’s novel presents its main narrative in a way which corresponds to Mach’s theory of the thought experiment, whereby the thought experiment allows us to access inherited evolutionary knowledge about the world, and can thus provide new information even within an empiricist outlook. After this, I will briefly examine a later case of literary treatment of the thought experiment, this time in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, in which a thought experiment mentioned in the text is actually performed in the middle section of the novel, being transformed at the same time into a multivalent symbol.
I will finish by presenting some tentative conclusions on the topic, namely that the literary treatment of thought experiments interestingly mirrors the contours of discussion on them, and that this itself may bolster the view advanced by philosopher Martha Nussbaum that certain philosophical ideas have a profound relationship to, and can be best articulated only within, literary form.