Alice Murphy (University of Leeds)
Mental model accounts of thought experiments are grounded in research in cognitive science on constructing and manipulating "structural analogues" of real world events in problem solving tasks. These accounts highlight the crucial role of the imagination in scientific thought experiments. However, an issue remains unresolved: is the nature of the imagination (always) imagistic, or can the theory accommodate cases where the productivity of the imagination is restricted to a propositional kind? I argue this must be settled if the mental model view is to provide a forceful push against Norton's eliminativism. As it stands, it's not a useful alternative.
