Thought experiments in the context of the history and philosophy of science

The debate on how scientific thought experiments should be approached and evaluated is still up to date and new perspectives continue to be offered. In this thesis, we will defend the experimentalist position by taking a position in the current debate. We will proceed step by step by justifying our position in the three main chapters of this thesis. In the first section, we will introduce scientific thought experiments, show how this method emerged, what functions it has, the problem of idealization, how it should be defined within the framework of the concept of experiment, and finally we will conduct a discussion on the literature. In the second section, we will look at the history of science and examine the use of scientific thought experiments with Galileo and Newton in particular. In this section, we will show, especially through Galileo, for what purpose and for how scientific thought experiments are designed, what impact their use has had on the history of science, and how much power a properly designed scientific thought experiment has. Finally, in the third section, we will create a taxonomy and discuss how scientific thought experiments are evaluated. In this section, both past and current perspectives will be analyzed in the first part, and in the second part, we will point out the deficiencies and mistakes of these perspectives from our point of view. Subsequently, there will be a defense of the empiricist alternative on how scientific thought experiments should be handled and evaluated.