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The Importance of Thinking Experiments
John Norton thinks of experiments as if as a kind of if then reasoning. What we do is very much like a qualitative simulation in our mind. We start out with certain premises and then we build a certain kind of deductive reasoning. But just like in a computer simulation there are fundamentally two things that can go wrong with a far experiment. Either the premises can be wrong. Or vice versa you can start with the correct premises or a set of correct premises and then you can make a mistake in the actual reasoning.