Abstract
The paper presents Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as the first systematic attempt to claim that the normal methods of testing belief and opinion for clarity, consistence, coherence, and how they stand to the facts are powerless when applied to deep-seated normative commitments, or what Wittgenstein dubbed “framework truths.” To subject our norms to normative critique requires a measure of self-alienation that cannot be achieved merely by looking hard at or thinking hard about our world and ourselves. However, by closely examining the contrived counterfactual scenarios (or, as I have shown in former work, by exposure to the normative critique of significant others), that Swift is shown to claim, such normative framework assumptions can be challenged to great effect! The standard epistemologies of his day—Baconian empiricism and Cartesian rationalism—fiercely ridiculed in the course of Gulliver’s third voyage are cruelly dismissed as powerless to change the course of science and keep it in normative check. The transformative effect of the clever thought experiments presented in the three other voyages (of imagining London shrunk to a twelfth of its size and enlarged to giant proportions, and a more responsible and intelligent race of beings inserted above (normally sized) humans) enable Swift to obtain critical normative distance from several major assumptions about politics, religion, aesthetics, ethics, and much more, including the limits of the thought experiment itself. The paper then goes to show how the same kind of counterfactual scenarios are put to impressive use in the Talmudic literature, with special reference to foundational questions of ethics and law.
Highlights
The idea that science owes much of its epistemic authority to the empirical testability of its theories runs deep
Insofar as science aims at adequately describing and explaining the world we experience, it is to the tribunal of the facts of our sense experience that its efforts should be held accountable
Whether or not there are grounds for claiming that the facts we experience represent, correspond, or in some sense resemble the world without, is a different and disputed question that has no bearing on the empirical nature of scientific authority. (I, for one, side with those who consider it a question that cannot even be posed coherently, but that is beside the point.). It is against this backdrop that scientific thought experiments emerge as so puzzling
Summary
The idea that science owes much of its epistemic authority to the empirical testability of its theories runs deep. Whether or not there are grounds for claiming that the facts we experience represent, correspond, or in some sense resemble the world without, is a different and disputed question that has no bearing on the empirical nature of scientific authority. (I, for one, side with those who consider it a question that cannot even be posed coherently, but that is beside the point.) It is against this backdrop that scientific thought experiments emerge as so puzzling.. Religions 2019, 10, 228 that studying imaginatively contrived and especially counterfactual scenarios can somehow teach us important lessons about the world we live in that renders them so baffling.
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