ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the methodological changes in order to identify a philosophical role for thought experiments. Thought experiments help to identify logically contingent, though cognitively fundamental capacities and circumstances necessary to human thought, experience and knowledge. Experiments are only informative in response to posing the right question, indeed: the right kind of question. The chapter examines three such thought experiments, variously developed by Kant, Hegel, C. I. Lewis, Austin, Wittgenstein and F. L. Will. Hegel's phenomenological method involves establishing some positive conclusions through strictly internal critique of the views and principles he opposes, considered in connection with their intended domains of use. In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and in his subsequent systematic philosophy, Hegel undertakes to revamp and augment Kant's Critical account of rational judgment and justification, whilst dispensing with Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Like Kant's, Hegel's cognitive psychology accords well with much recent cognitive science.
