Abstract
Outlandish thought experiments are standard methodology in the philosophy of personal identity, but a critic is right to exercise suspicion about the value of unconstrained imagination. It may seem that puzzle cases are just fanciful stories. How could anyone serious about metaphysics of persons think they can give knowledge? Questioning this assumption, I argue for a “literary model of philosophical thought experiments”: their cognitive value can be found in thinking of them as like fiction. In aesthetics, the link between thought experiments and fiction has been discussed, but I suggest changing the direction of fit: the cognitive value of thought experiments can be illuminated by thinking of them as incomplete fictions, and not the other way around. When we bring the resources of the literary fictional to bear on our understanding of thought experiments by envisioning a fictional world, we gain insight into the overall coherence of the cluster of features that we associate with a person’s life and their interactions. While the proposal requires changes in how we view thought experiments, it is not as radical and is congenial to recent theoretical developments in the personal identity literature.
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