Between June 15 and 17, Diana Neiva will be present at MAK2026 - Mind, Art, Knowledge: Dialogues Between Cognitive Science, Artistic Practice and Philosophy, at the KVAB - Rubensauditorium, in Brussels. This three-day symposium brings together artists, artistic researchers, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. It will investigate how artistic knowing emerges from the interplay of perception, embodiment, and cognition, and how it can be articulated in dialogue with philosophy and science. You can access the full pogram here.
Diana Neiva's presentation is titled "Films as philosophical thought experiments" and will occur on June 17.
Abstract The question of whether films can do philosophy has generated substantial debate in the past few decades. The dominant sceptical objections – the explicitness objection (Murray Smith) and the generality objection (Bruce Russell) – challenge film’s capacity to produce anything that rises to the level of philosophy. In response, several philosophers have appealed to thought experimentation as the mechanism through which films might philosophise: if films can function as philosophical thought experiments, they need not produce explicit arguments to make a philosophical contribution.
This paper develops and defends that appeal, while taking seriously the demands of what Livingston (2006) calls the “bold thesis”, the requirement that cinematic philosophy emerge from characteristically cinematic means and constitute a contribution not merely derivative of what could be done through text alone.
I argue that some films can function as philosophical thought experiments, and that examining this claim illuminates not only what philosophical work films can do, but also what kind of knowledge-production thought experimentation itself involves.
The argument develops in three stages.
First, I examine what makes thought experiments philosophically productive. Against views that locate their value solely in explicit argumentation or in the reliable triggering of intuitions, I draw on Elgin (1993, 2014) and Davies (2018), who emphasise the activation of tacit, experientially-grounded understanding. On this reading, thought experiments work by reorganising conceptual structures and making available what we already know but have not yet been able to articulate. The richness and specificity of the scenario are often what give the thought experiment its traction.
Second, I argue that films are particularly well-suited to this kind of cognitive work. Cinematic thought experiments engage viewers through quasi-observational experience, emotional immersion, and the construction of detailed counterfactual worlds. These are conditions for philosophical understanding. This connects to what cognitive accounts of film have established about embodied simulation and mental modelling (Miščević 1992; Gendler 2004), and to Elgin’s argument that exemplification (the way artworks instantiate and refer to the very features they investigate) constitutes a distinctive form of epistemic access.
Third, I demonstrate these claims through analysis of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). This film functions as a possibility-establishing thought experiment, exploring what follows from the destabilisation of the boundary between dreaming and waking consciousness. It does not merely describe this possibility; it induces a version of the relevant epistemological uncertainty in the viewer through its “rubber reality” formal strategies. This reading is informed by a moderate intentionalist approach, grounded in evidence from the film itself and supported by Craven’s own extensive commentary on his work.
The broader implication is this: if thought experiments derive their philosophical value from the activation of tacit understanding rather than from explicit argumentation, then the richness, embodied engagement, and emotional force of cinema are potential advantages. More broadly, this suggests that what makes artistic practice epistemically productive is not the presence of propositional content but the capacity to reorganise understanding through perceptual and affective engagement, a point with implications well beyond the case of film.
