ABSTRACT
At some of the crucial junctures in the history of political philosophy, in the works that have strongly marked its development, we find appeals to the reader to imagine some social arrangement, judge it and then reason from these judgments. In the Republic, Plato famously invites us, through his character Socrates, to build a state “in the logos,” presumably meaning in thought and speech, observe how it works, and, from there, read off the true nature of justice (369a5–10). J. J. Rousseau, in introducing his Social Contract, asks us to “set aside the facts” and turn to “the right and the reason” and think of an arrangement, a contract that will solve the problem of preserving freedom in an organized political society (in his posthumously published methodological introduction, Rousseau 1915, 473). 1 In the twentieth century, John Rawls famously invites us to get in the armchair and imagine that we are behind a veil of ignorance, which hides from us crucially important information about ourselves and about the people we shall be within society, and to consider what kind of political arrangement (“basic structure”) and principles we would favour under such circumstances. Like in the Republic and in the Social Contract, the process of imagining is here supposed to give us the crucial data for building a theory of a just society. These episodes of imagining and judging are pretty clearly examples of what are now called thought experiments. Such experiments, it is clear already from the three famous examples we listed, are normally concerned with properties of imagined political arrangement, and also and more abstractly, of principles guiding and structuring them. Two great works of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic and Rawls’s A Theory of Justice are arguably long thought experiments, and elements of thought-experimenting are omnipresent both in utopian (including dystopian) and contractualist thinking. (I shall in the following abridge “political thought experiment” with “PTEs,” using “TE” alone for “thought experiment”). The tradition continues, in a most lively and creative manner; see, for instance, Gaus (2011) for an interesting discussion.
