The Importance of Thought Experiments in Understanding Scientific Theories

Against the informational and propositional character of knowledge, the idea that understanding is not a form of knowledge will be developed, since it is related to veritism and reliability, while understanding (comprehension) has to do with explanatory, objectual, technical relations, as coherentism had suggested for the problem of justification. The turn in epistemology has to do with the problem of the value of knowledge, now in terms of understanding, since this gives order and systematicity to thought. Then it will be argued that the fundamental feature of science is representational capacity, and the means to represent are not true beliefs but modeling, that is, functional theoretical models as idealization of the most relevant characteristics, leaving aside those that are not, depending on the objectives. Finally, the thesis is defended that mental experiments do not generate knowledge but rather broaden scientific understanding, understanding this as the most important cognitive achievement. In other words, mental experiments are a narrative way of generating mobile models of scientific theories. Mental experiments should be understood as actions of thought that allow to deepen a theory, to refute a hypothesis, but mainly have didactic functions of explanatory nature. Mental experiments contribute to understanding and rely heavily on imagination and narrative. Mental experiments are a very useful cognitive tool since, not being true, they allow fictitious approximations that can be refined in terms of their adequacy to the theoretical models.