Philosophy and Thought Experiment

At least some Philosophy can conceived as a thought experiment, an attempt, beginning with a set of assumptions, to produce certain results.  For example, Foundational Empiricism attempts to derive all Knowledge from Sense-Data.  However, it fails to do so in two important cases--imaginable though never actually perceived colors and tones, and the time-ordering of Cause and Effect.  Now, since the latter is first recognized decades later, by Kant, Hume is unaware of it.  However, he directly addresses the former, recognizing that his 'missing shade of blue' does indeed constitute a failure for his enterprise, but judges it to be too insignificant a failure to warrant jettisoning the project.  In contrast, Whitehead disagrees, using the failure to introduce into the original set of assumptions the theses of the existence of what he calls 'Eternal Objects', e. g. all the musical tones, all the colors of the spectrum, that influence actual specific Sense-Experience implicitly.  The result, as it is for Kant, is a new thought experiment, incorporating a more comprehensive set of assumptions, an ironic development given Whitehead's opposition to Experimentalism, as has been previously discussed.