Wittgenstein’s Thought Experiments and Relativity Theory

In this paper, I will discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. In the first section, I introduce Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiment” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. In the second section, I present a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Relativity theory. In the third paragraph, I will suggest more explicit analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments on three analogies: the topics of time dilation, search for invariants, and the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will bring us to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of the philosophical enterprise.

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise.