The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten

"Thought experiments are great. They have a stickman quality to them, I think they’ve been described as stickman stories, they lack a real life dimension. The reason why I’ve chosen Julian’s book is because I find thought experiments a really lively way to get children involved with philosophy. It’s the fun bit, the evocative bit. They’re very powerful. If you want to get children involved in thinking about philosophy, most philosophers will start with a thought experiment of one kind or another. This book gives us lots of examples of how you can take a thought experiment into the classroom. They’re also bite-sized. They don’t require the sort of investment that telling the Odyssey does. A thought experiment you can just drop it in, you can parachute it into someone’s consciousness and it can have a really powerful, catalytic effect. Plus there’s what you already mentioned, which is that the thought experiment does try to hang onto the variables. This is also one of the problems with thought experiments, of course. When you go into a classroom, and you present the thought experiment to a bunch of people that don’t know what a thought experiment is, you do have often have children saying, ‘Maybe this and maybe that.’ They bring back the variables that have been removed in order to test whatever it is you’re testing. Yes, they just throw these things back in and it can be quite tricky. In order to help with this, we’ve developed a series of questioning techniques at the Philosophy Foundation, along the lines of ‘iffing’. A classic example would be brain swapping. You get into a discussion of, if they swapped brains, where would Connor be and where would Matthew be? It’s a great discussion, but often children will come in with things like, ‘But we can’t do brain swaps yet.’ Then we simply say to them “Well if it were possible to do these, then where do you think that these two people would be?” With a thought experiment it doesn’t matter if it’s wrong in the real world, as long as it’s wrong in the right kind of way. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Some children do respond in that way, not with that kind of sophistication, but they’ll just dig their heels in. The strategy usually is not to put them on the spot, but to invite the whole class to think about the question and see what people think. The more sophisticated problem of how valid thought experiments are when they’re only hypothetical is not really something you can get into with very young children. With adults and teenagers you certainly can, it is a great issue to explore with older children."