Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Thought experiments have played a central role in historical cases of major conceptual change in science. They are important in both constructing new representations of nature and in conveying those representations to others. It is proposed that research into the role of mental modelling in narrative comprehension can illuminate how and why thought experiments work. In constructing and "running" the thought experiment, we make use of inferencing mechanisms, existing representations, and general world knowledge to make realistic transformations from one possible physical state to the next and this process reveals impossibility of applying existing concepts to the world and pinpoints the locus of needed conceptual reform.