THE IMPORTANCE OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Living in the world of legal norms seems to be easy: you have rules of conduct guiding you how to behave in a lot of life situations including the fact what will happen to you if you do not obey these rules. In a way, legal norms are predicting the future giving us the guidelines for living. Although the legal system together with its rules tend to cover all areas of social life, there are situations that couldn’t be foreseen at the time of making a particular regulation. These gaps could be spanned by adopting subsequent rules of conduct. In order to predict an event that may occur, and to predict human behavior in these situations as well as a human response to punishment when someone violates a rule, it is good to conduct- a thought experiment. The basis of a thought experiment can be a completely fictitious and even currently impossible event, or a variation of some of the known and possible events. The key question when formulating a thought experiment is “what if”. The answers to this question may start with “then it is possible”, “then it will be”, “it could be” or something similar. The answers will differ in terms of content only on the basis of the values, beliefs and attitudes of the one who answers the “what if” question. In our paper, we will briefly present the concept of a thought experiment, its internal structure, types and, by giving some examples, encourage readers to be more informed about this topic.