In Defense of Weird Hypotheticals

Abstract

Professor Allen (this issue) critiques the value of using “weird” hypotheticals to mine intuitions about legal systems. I respond by supporting the value of “thin” hypotheticals for providing information about how people reason generally, rather than for revealing peoples’ specific answers. I note that because legal systems are the products of many minds thinking about how other minds operate, the object of inquiry is metacognition—that is, understanding how reason-