The epistemic value of understanding has been marginalized for the better part of the twentieth century. Given this, and given the strong focus on knowledge production in the existing literature in philosophy of science, it might be worth paying closer attention to how understanding of theories and/or the phenomena in their domain is facilitated through TEs.Īs has been recently noted (Stuart 2018), such a shift in attention gains additional plausibility from recent work in mainstream philosophy of science and epistemology. Although it is certainly correct that some TEs were intended to facilitate knowledge about reality, more often than not TEs in science seem to have served other purposes, such as disclosing inconsistencies in existing theories or, perhaps even more important, making consequences of theories easier to understand. This might seem surprising, especially in light of the historical record. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries.Looking back at the past three decades, the philosophical debate about thought experiments (“TEs”) is characterized by a strong focus on their alleged knowledge-producing powers (cf., for an overview, Brown and Fehige 2017). A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand-despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. The monumental Hugo and Nebula award winning SF classic- Featuring a new introduction by John Scalzi "The legendary novel of extraterrestrial war in an uncaring universe comes to comics, in a stunningly realized vision of Joe Haldeman's Vietnam War parable epic war story spanning relativistic space and time, The Forever War explores one soldier's experience as he is caught up in the brutal machinery of a war against an unknown and unknowable alien foe that reaches across the stars".
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