I think we need a clearer idea of what we mean by a ‘bad’ thought experiment. Sometimes thought experiments are good precisely because they make us recognize (sometimes deliberately) that one of the concepts we imported into the experiment is unworkable. Searle’s Chinese room is a good example of this, since it (and a class of similar thought experiments) helps show that our intuitive conceptions of the mental are, on a physicalist account, defective in a variety of ways. The right response is to analyze and revise the problem concepts. The right response is not to simply pretend that the thought experiment was never proposed; the results of thought experiments are data, even if they’re only data about our own imaginative faculties.
I think we need a clearer idea of what we mean by a ‘bad’ thought experiment. Sometimes thought experiments are good precisely because they make us recognize (sometimes deliberately) that one of the concepts we imported into the experiment is unworkable. Searle’s Chinese room is a good example of this, since it (and a class of similar thought experiments) helps show that our intuitive conceptions of the mental are, on a physicalist account, defective in a variety of ways. The right response is to analyze and revise the problem concepts. The right response is not to simply pretend that the thought experiment was never proposed; the results of thought experiments are data, even if they’re only data about our own imaginative faculties.