Why are thought experiments (not) arguments

Bishop, M. (1999). Why are thought experiments not arguments. Philosophy of Science, 66(4), 534-541

Another answer to Kuhn’s puzzle: “Without any new informationfrom the world, thought experiments can yield new information about the world. Norton claims that only arguments uncontroversially have this property, since the conclusion of an argument can make explicit information that was implicit in the argument's premises. Others who identify thought experiments with arguments are Nicholas Rescher, Andrew D. Irvine, and John Forge.”

For the whole clock-in-the box thing,

The turning point seems to be marked with Einstein's thought experiment, in which a box has a shutter which opens at a precise time and lets out a single photon of light. Seemingly we can know when the photon left the box as precisely as we wish. We can also find out the energy of the photon by weighing the box before and after (since mass and energy are equivalent). This seems to contradict quantum theory, which says that the product of the uncertainty of the energy and that of the time must exceed Planck's constant. Niels Bohr answered this by saying that weighing it would mean that it would move within a gravitational field, and then Einstein's own general theory of relativity would say that the rate at which the clock ran would change, and we would end up with an uncertainty in the time. This gedanken experiment is mentioned pretty often, and the implication seems to be that Einstein couldn't even figure out the consequences of his own theory, and so his productive life was at an end.

To this, Bishop notes:

This episode raises what I believe is an insuperable problem for any attempt to identify the clock-in-the-box thought experiment with a t-argument. The problem is that Bohr and Einstein were analyzing one thought experiment, but they were proposing two different t-arguments. Therefore, the clock-in-the-box thought experiment cannot be a t-argument. To make this argument stick, let us begin with a prosaic claim: Both real and thought experiments can be, and sometimes are, repeated. For this to be so, it must be possible for there to be different tokens of one experiment-type.

If thought experiments are t-arguments, then thought experiment-typesa re t-argument-types. The argument view of thought experiments is committed to the following thesis.

(A) Two tokens of a thought experiment are tokens of the same thought experiment-type if and only if they are tokens of the same t-argument type.

The problem is that in the clock-in-the-box episode, A is false. The t-arguments proposed by Bohr and Einstein were not type-identical, but the thought experiments they proposed were type-identical. If this is correct, then the argument view of thought experiments is false.

And then the conclusion falls prophetically (note that this is the last paragraph of the article):

In the clock-in-the-box episode, there are tokens of two t-argument types but tokens of just one thought experiment-type. Thesis A is false. Since we have two different arguments but just one thought experiment, the thought experiment cannot be the arguments. Episodes like this one are not rare in the history of science. People often disagree about the results of thought experiments. Any attempt to identify thought experiments with t-arguments will lead to false and misleading characterizations of such episodes. Thought experiments are not arguments.