%0 Journal Article %J Organon F %D 2011 %T How to Reconstruct a Thought Experiment %A Picha, Marek %X The paper is a contribution to the debate on the epistemological status of thought experiments. I deal with the epistemological uniqueness of experiments in the sense of their irreducibility to other sources of justification. In particular, I criticize an influential argument for the irreducibility of thought experiments to general arguments. First, I introduce the radical empiricist theory of eliminativism, which considers thought experiments to be rhetorically modified arguments, uninteresting from the epistemological point of view. Second, I present objections to the theory, focusing on the critique of eliminativism by Tamar Szabó Gendler based on the reconstruction of Galileo’s famous Pisa experiment. I show that her reconstruction is simplistic and that a more elaborate reconstruction is needed for an appropriate assess-ment of the epistemic power of general argument. I propose such a reconstruction and demonstrate that the general version of the Pisa experiment is epistemically equal to the particular one. Thus, from an epistemological perspective, Galileo’s thought experiment is reducible to a straightforward argument without particular premises. %B Organon F %V 18 %P 154-188 %U http://www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/doc/organon/2011/2/154-188.pdf %9 State %2 Papers %3 154188