Kamilla Taraeva: "Why Thought-Experiments are Not Fictions"

Kamilla Taraeva, Uppsala University: "Why Thought-Experiments are Not Fictions"

Abstract
Defenders of aesthetic cognitivism often argue that literary fictions play a similar cognitive role in their capacity to transmit knowledge as thought experiments do in natural sciences. The claim rests on an analogy between two central properties shared by them: fictionality and narrativity. In this talk, I refute the claim that the former is relevantly analogous. I argue that thought experiments and literary fictions call for two different notions of fictionality, so much so that the cognitive function of thought experiments cannot be projected onto literary fictions.