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The persistent interpretation problem for quantum mechanics may indicate an unwillingness to consider unpalatable assumptions that could open the way toward progress. With this in mind, I focus on the work of David Bohm, whose earlier work has been more influential than that of his later. As I’ll discuss, I believe two assumptions play a strong role in explaining the disparity: 1) that theories in physics must be grounded in mathematical structure and 2) that consciousness must supervene on material processes. (...) |
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Eine Rezension des Buches "Every Thing Must Go - Metaphysics Naturalized" von James Ladyman und Don Ross. |
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Paper on structural realism and how its problems lend support to some kind of panpsychism. |
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I discuss the design of the method of entropic inference as a general framework for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. The main contribution of this discussion is to emphasize the pragmatic elements in the derivation. More specifically: (1) Probability theory is designed as the uniquely natural tool for representing states of incomplete information. (2) An epistemic notion of information is defined in terms of its relation to the Bayesian beliefs of ideally rational agents. (3) The method of updating from a (...) |
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Dans Science, Perception and Reality, Sellars distingue l’image manifeste de l’homme et l’image scientifique de l’homme. La première est obtenue à partir de la façon dont nous prenons conscience de nous-mêmes comme humains dans le monde. La seconde correspond à ce que les différentes sciences nous amènent à postuler sur la manière dont l’homme est constitué. Van Fraassen, lui, étend au monde ces concepts... |
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En el presente trabajo analizo críticamente dos estrategias empleadas para esclarecer la naturaleza modal de las estructuras tal como son concebidas por el realismo estructural óntico (reo) en su versión eliminativista: los patrones reales de Ladyman y Ross (2007) y las leyes y simetrías de French (2014). Ofrezco argumentos para mostrar que ambas resultan incapaces de brindar una caracterización de las estructuras como entidades inherentemente modales. Ese resultado impone serias dificultades al proyecto de presentar el reo como una posición realista (...) |
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RESUMEN En el presente trabajo analizo críticamente dos estrategias empleadas para esclarecer la naturaleza modal de las estructuras tal como son concebidas por el realismo estructural óntico en su versión eliminativista: los patrones reales de Ladyman y Ross y las leyes y simetrías de French. Ofrezco argumentos para mostrar que ambas resultan incapaces de brindar una caracterización de las estructuras como entidades inherentemente modales. Ese resultado impone serias dificultades al proyecto de presentar el REO como una posición realista acerca del (...) |
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Empiricists claim that in accepting a scientific theory one should not commit oneself to claims about things that are not observable in the sense of registering on human perceptual systems (according to Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism) or experimental equipment (according to what I call liberal empiricism ). They also claim scientific theories should be accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they save the phenomena in the sense delivering unified descriptions of natural regularities among things that meet their (...) |
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Despite remarkable efforts, it remains notoriously difficult to equip quantum theory with a coherent ontology. Hence, Healey (2017, 12) has recently suggested that ‘‘quantum theory has no physical ontology and states no facts about physical objects or events’’, and Fuchs et al. (2014, 752) similarly hold that ‘‘quantum mechanics itself does not deal directly with the objective world’’. While intriguing, these positions either raise the question of how talk of ‘physical reality’ can even remain meaningful, or they must ultimately embrace (...) |
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Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI). A standard response to the PMI is selective scientific realism (SSR), wherein only the working posits of a theory are considered worthy of doxastic commitment. Building on the recent debate over the NMA and the connections between the NMA and the PMI, I here consider a stronger inductive argument that poses a direct challenge for SSR: Because it (...) |
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According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the (...) |
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I examine Reichenbach’s theory of relative a priori and Michael Friedman’s interpretation of it. I argue that Reichenbach’s view remains at bottom conventionalist and that one issue which separates Reichenbach’s account from Kant’s apriorism is the problem of mathematical applicability. I then discuss Hermann Weyl’s theory of blank forms which in many ways runs parallel to the theory of relative a priori. I argue that it is capable of dealing with the problem of applicability, but with a cost. |
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Two symmetry arguments are discussed, each purporting to show that there is no more room for a preferred division of spacetime into instants of time in general relativistic cosmology than in Minkowski spacetime. The first argument is due to Gödel, and concerns the symmetries of his famous rotating cosmologies. The second turns upon the symmetries of a certain space of relativistic possibilities. Both arguments are found wanting. |
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According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is somehow shallow and lacking in reality. For all we knwo, the intuition goes, we could be living in a cave facing shadows, in a dream or even in a computer simulation, This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it (...) |
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The aim of this paper is to show that the French philosopher and historian of science Abel Rey played a more influential role in the formative phase of the Vienna Circle than hitherto supposed. On the whole, it will be argued that Rey's contribution had political impact. His interpretation of "modern physics" in 1907 in the face of the alleged "bankruptcy of science" should be appreciated as a masterpiece of applied enlightenment thought. As such, it was especially paradigmatic for Philipp (...) |
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I argue that scientific and poetic modes of objectivity are perspectival duals: 'views' from and onto basic natural forces, respectively. I ground this analysis in a general account of objectivity, not in terms of either 'universal' or 'inter-subjective' validity, but as receptivity to basic features of reality. Contra traditionalists, bare truth, factual knowledge, and universally valid representation are not inherently valuable. But modern critics who focus primarily on the self-expressive aspect of science are also wrong to claim that our knowledge (...) |
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Three accounts of effective realism (ER) have been advanced to solve three problems for scientific realism: Fraser and Vickers (forthcoming) develop a version of ER about non-relativistic quantum mechanics that they argue is compatible with all the main realist versions (‘interpretations’) of quantum mechanics avoiding the problem of underdetermination among them; Williams (2019) and Fraser (2020b) propose ER about quantum field theory as a response to the problems facing realist interpretations; Robertson and Wilson (forthcoming) propose ER to deal with the (...) |
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The volume includes twenty-five research papers presented as gifts to John L. Bell to celebrate his 60th birthday by colleagues, former students, friends and admirers. Like Bell’s own work, the contributions cross boundaries into several inter-related fields. The contributions are new work by highly respected figures, several of whom are among the key figures in their fields. Some examples: in foundations of maths and logic ; analytical philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics and decision theory and foundations of economics. (...) |
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The ontic structural realist stance is motivated by a desire to do philosophical justice to the success of science, whilst withstanding the metaphysical undermining generated by the various species of ontological underdetermination. We are, however, as yet in want of general principles to provide a scaffold for the explicit construction of structural ontologies. Here we will attempt to bridge this gap by utilizing the formal procedure of quantization as a guide to ontic structure of modern physical theory. The example of (...) |
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Scientific realists endeavour to secure inferences from empirical success to approximate truth by arguing that despite the demise of empirically successful theories the parts of those theories responsible for their success do in fact survive theory change. If, as some anti-realists have recently suggested, those parts of theories that are responsible for their success are only identifiable in retrospect, namely as those that have survived, then the realist approach is trivialised for now success and survival are guaranteed to coincide. The (...) |
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Reply in Book Symposium on James Ladyman, Don Ross: 'Everything must go: metaphysics naturalized', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. |
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Starting from a brief recapitulation of the contemporary debate on scientific realism, this paper argues for the following thesis : Assume a theory T has been empirically successful in a domain of application A, but was superseded later on by a superior theory T * , which was likewise successful in A but has an arbitrarily different theoretical superstructure. Then under natural conditions T contains certain theoretical expressions, which yielded T's empirical success, such that these T-expressions correspond (in A) to (...) |
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This paper utilizes a logical correspondence theorem (which has been proved elsewhere) for the justification of weak conceptions of scientific realism and convergence to truth which do not presuppose Putnam's no-miracles-argument (NMA). After presenting arguments against the reliability of the unrestricted NMA in Sect. 1, the correspondence theorem is explained in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3, historical illustrations of the correspondence theorem are given, and its ontological consequences are worked out. Based on the transitivity of the concept of correspondence, a (...) |
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At stake in the classical realism-debate is the clash between realist and anti-realist positions. In recent years, the classical form of this debate has undergone a double transformation. On the one hand, the champions of realism began to pay more attention to the interpretative dimensions of scientific research. On the other hand, anti-realists of various sorts realized that the rejection of the hypostatization of a “reality out there” does not imply the denial of working out a philosophically adequate concept of (...) |
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Eclectic realism is defended against the criticism in Busch by clarifying its terminological and conceptual basis, and by comparing it with structural and semirealism.Keywords: Realism; Pessimistic induction; Augustin Jean Fresnel; Eclectic realism; Semi-realism. |
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Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2-3, Page 202-220, April 2022. |
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Dualists say plausible things about our mental concepts: there is a way of thinking of pain, in terms of how it feels, which is independent of causal role. Physicalists make attractive ontological claims: the world is wholly physical. The attraction of a posteriori physicalism is that it has seemed to do both: to agree with the dualist about our mental concepts, whilst retaining a physicalist ontology. In this paper I argue that, in fact, a posteriori physicalism departs from the dualist's (...) |
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This paper is a critical response to Andreas Bartels’ sophisticated defense of a structural account of scientific representation. We show that, contrary to Bartels’ claim, homomorphism fails to account for the phenomenon of misrepresentation. Bartels claims that homomorphism is adequate in two respects. First, it is conceptually adequate, in the sense that it shows how representation differs from misrepresentation and non-representation. Second, if properly weakened, homomorphism is formally adequate to accommodate misrepresentation. We question both claims. First, we show that homomorphism (...) |
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We argue that the economy of nature constitutes an invocation of structure in the biological sciences, one largely missed by philosophers of biology despite the turn in recent years toward structural explanations throughout the philosophy of science. We trace a portion of the history of this concept, beginning with the theologically and economically grounded work of Linnaeus, moving through Darwin’s adaptation of the economy of nature and its reconstitution in genetic terms during the first decades of the Modern Synthesis. What (...) |
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Eino Kaila's thought occupies a curious position within the logical empiricist movement. Along with Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, and the early Moritz Schlick, Kaila advocates a realist approach towards science and the project of a “scientific world conception”. This realist approach was chiefly directed at both Kantianism and Poincaréan conventionalism. The case in point was the theory of measurement. According to Kaila, the foundations of physical reality are characterized by the existence of invariant systems of relations, which he called structures. (...) |
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Pierre Duhem gilt ais einer der wichtigsten Reprüsentanten der franzosischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie um 1900. Seine Konzeption physikalischer Theorien wird üblicherweise ais moderne Umsetzung des antiken – proto-positivistischen – Programms der „Rettung der Phänomene‟ angesehen. Diese Sicht ist richtig, bedarf aber der Ergänzung, indem der diskursive Kontext der Duhemschen Position berücksichtigt wird. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird dargelegt, dass Duhems philosophischer Zeitgenosse Abel Rey eine zentrale Rolle in diesem Zusammenhang spielte. |
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According to recent arguments for panpsychism, all physical properties are dispositional, dispositions require categorical grounds, and the only categorical properties we know are phenomenal properties. Therefore, phenomenal properties can be posited as the categorical grounds of all physical properties—in order to solve the mind–body problem and/or in order avoid noumenalism about the grounds of the physical world. One challenge to this case comes from dispositionalism, which agrees that all physical properties are dispositional, but denies that dispositions require categorical grounds. In (...) |
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In the last decade, structural realism has been presented as the most promising strategy for developing a defensible realist view of science. Nevertheless, controversy still continues in relation to the exact meaning of the proposed structuralism. The stronger version of structural realism, the so-called ontic structural realism, has been argued for on the basis of some ideas related to quantum mechanics. In this paper, I will first outline these arguments, mainly developed by Steven French and James Ladyman, then challenge them, (...) |
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Ontic structural realism is at its core the view that “structure is ontologically fundamental.” Informed from its inception by the scientific revolutions that punctuated the 20th century, its advocates often present the position as the perspective on ontology best befitting of modern physics. But the idea that structure is fundamental has proved difficult to articulate adequately, and what OSR's claimed naturalistic credentials consist in is hard to precisify as well. Nor is it clear that the position is actually supported by (...) |
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A priori metaphysics has come under repeated attack by naturalistic metaphysicians, who take their closer connection to the sciences to confer greater epistemic credentials on their theories. But it is hard to see how this can be so unless the problem of theory change that has for so long vexed philosophers of science can be addressed in the context of scientific metaphysics. This paper argues that canonical metaphysical claims, unlike their scientific counterparts, cannot meaningfully be regarded as ‘approximately true,’ and (...) |
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The aim of this paper is to take Galileo's mathematization of nature as a springboard for contrasting the time-honoured empiricist conception of phenomena, exemplified by Pierre Duhem's analysis in To Save the Phenomena , with Immanuel Kant's. Hence the purpose of this paper is twofold. I) On the philosophical side, I want to draw attention to Kant's more robust conception of phenomena compared to the one we have inherited from Duhem and contemporary empiricism. II) On the historical side, I want (...) |
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Recent semantic approaches to scientific structuralism, aiming to make precise the concept of shared structure between models, formally frame a model as a type of set-structure. This framework is then used to provide a semantic account of (a) the structure of a scientific theory, (b) the applicability of a mathematical theory to a physical theory, and (c) the structural realist’s appeal to the structural continuity between successive physical theories. In this paper, I challenge the idea that, to be so used, (...) |
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This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which appeals to philosophical developments at (...) |
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ABSTRACT In the current debate between scientific realism and empiricism, both sides seem to embrace some sort of structuralism as an important component of their descriptions of science. The structural realism is generally presented in two versions: one ontic and the other epistemic. It has been argued that that epistemic structural realism is close, if not identical, to a Kantian approach. We aim to show that this is not the case, since ESR, being fundamentally a realist position, cannot be fully (...) |
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In this paper, I try to decipher the role of internal symmetries in the ontological maze of particle physics. The relationship between internal symmetries and laws of nature is discussed within the framework of “Platonic realism.” The notion of physical “structure” is introduced as representing a deeper ontological layer behind the observable world. I argue that an internal symmetry is a structure encompassing laws of nature. The application of internal symmetry groups to particle physics came about in two revolutionary steps. (...) |
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I investigate what it means to have an interpretation of our language, how we manage to bestow a determinate interpretation to our utterances, and to which extent our interpretation of the world is determinate. All this is done in dialogue with van Fraassen's insightful discussion of Putnam's model-theoretic argument and of scientific structuralism. |
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