Philosophy of Science

In this, the first book devoted to Peter Achinstein's influential work in philosophy of science, twenty distinguished philosophers, including four Lakatos award winners, address various aspects of Achinstein's influential views on the nature of scientific evidence, scientific explanation, and scientific realism. It includes short chapters by Steve Gimbel and Jeff Maynes, Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Victor DiFate, Jerry Doppelt, Adam Goldstein, Philip Kitcher, Fred Kronz, Deborah Mayo, Greg Morgan, Helen Longino, John Norton, Michael Ruse, Bas van Fraassen, Stathis Psillos, Larry Laudan, Richard Richards, Kent Staley, and Jim Woodward with replies to each chapter from Peter Achinstein. The book aims to provide an understanding of the current debate in multiple areas of philosophy of science and how various contemporary issues are connected.

This book explores the nature of the distinction at the heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the limitations of what he called the ‘principle theory’ approach inspired by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great paper, and suggested that the dynamical understanding of length contraction and time dilation intimated by the immediate precursors of Einstein is more fundamental. This book both examines and extends these arguments (which support a more ‘constructive’ approach to relativistic effects in Einstein's terminology), after giving a careful analysis of key features of the pre-history of relativity theory. It argues furthermore that the geometrization of the theory by Minkowski in 1908 brought illumination, but not a causal explanation of relativistic effects. Finally, the book tries to show that the dynamical interpretation of special relativity defended in the book is consistent with the role this theory must play as a limiting case of Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity: the general theory of relativity.

Many theories and models from physics are probabilistic. This observation raises several philosophical questions: What are probabilities in physics? Do they reflect objective chances which exist independently of the human mind? Or do they only express subjective credences and thus capture our own uncertainty about the world? Finally, which metaphysical lessons, if at all, can one draw from the largely probabilistic character of physics? The chapters collected in this volume address these questions and provide a detailed philosophical appraisal of the status of probabilities in all of physics. Particular emphasis is laid upon statistical physics and quantum mechanics. Many chapters reflect a desire to understand probabilities from physics as objective chances. These chances are characterized, e.g., as time-averages, as probabilities from a best system in the terms of David Lewis, or using the Boltzmannian typicality approach. Other chapters are sympathetic to a Bayesian view of probabilities in physics. The chapters about quantum mechanics elucidate the peculiar characteristics of quantum correlations and discuss strategies to justify the Born Rule. Finally, the chapters of this volume demonstrate how closely interpretive issues about probabilities are entangled with other foundational problems of physics such as the Reversibility Paradox, the ontology of the quantum world and the question whether the world is deterministic.

This volume collects essays written by John Dupré during his time as Director of the ESRC centre for Genomics in Society, and reflects his interest in the implications of emerging ideas in biology for philosophy. Particular interests include: epigenetics and related areas of molecular biology that have eroded the exceptional status of the gene, and presented the genome as fully interactive with the rest of the cell; developmental systems theory which, especially in the light of epigenetics, provides a space for a vision of evolution that takes full account of the fundamental importance of developmental processes; and microbiology, the elephant in the room of contemporary philosophy of biology. The emphasis on the importance of microbes is perhaps the most distinctive theme of the essays, and one that is shown to subvert such basic biological assumptions as the organization of biological kinds on a branching Tree of Life, and the simple traditional conception of the biological organism. These topics are understood in the context of a view of science, partly taken from earlier work, but developed further in some of the present essays, as realistically grounded in the natural order, but at the same time pluralistic and inextricably integrated within a social and normative context. Topics to which these philosophical and scientific ideas are addressed include the nature of the organism, the limits of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the significance of genomics, the biological status of human races, and the evolutionary and developmental plasticity of human nature.

The book has two parts: one metaphysical, the other epistemological. The metaphysical part is largely concerned with realism issues. It starts with realism about universals, dismissing Plato's notorious ‘one over many’ problem. Several chapters argue for a fairly uncompromisingly realist view of the external physical world of commonsense and science. Both the nonfactualism of moral noncognitivism and positivistic instrumentalism, and deflationism about truth, are found to rest on antirealisms about their subject matters that are hard to characterize. A case is presented for moral realism. Various biological realisms are considered. Finally, an argument is presented for an unfashionable biological essentialism. The epistemological part of the book argues against the a priori and for a Quinean naturalism. The intuitions that so dominate ‘armchair philosophy’ are empirical not a priori. There is an emphasis throughout the book on distinguishing metaphysical issues about what there is and what it's like from semantic issues about meaning, truth, and reference. Another central theme, captured in the title, is that we should ‘put metaphysics first’. We should approach epistemology and semantics from a metaphysical perspective rather than vice versa. The epistemological turn in modern philosophy and the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy were something of disasters.

Quantum theory was developed in response to a welter of new experimental phenomena, yet appeared to depict a world so esoteric as to be literally unimaginable. Interpretation of the theory became feasible only after von Neumann's theoretical unification, but von Neumann's own interpretation astonishingly implied that in measurement something happens that violates Schroedinger's equation, the theory's cornerstone. This book argues first of all that the phenomena themselves, without theoretical motives, suffice to eliminate ’common cause’ models, thus requiring a radical departure from classical physics models. The measurement process, however, has an adequate description of itself as a quantum‐mechanical process, so that the theory can be seen as complete in a relevant sense. But the question of interpretation, ‘How could the world possibly be the way this theory says it is?’, is not thereby answered. In response to that question it is argued that the theory admits a plurality of interpretations, each of which helps to understand the theory further, but also advocates one particular interpretation (the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation). That interpretation is then applied to such topics as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox and the problem of ’identical’ particles, quantum statistics, identity, and individuation.

This book presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s. The standard theory of quantum mechanics is in one sense the most successful physical theory ever, predicting the behaviour of the basic constituents of all physical things; no other theory has ever made such accurate empirical predictions. However, if one tries to understand the theory as providing a complete and accurate framework for the description of the behaviour of all physical interactions, it becomes evident that the theory is ambiguous, or even logically inconsistent. The most notable attempt to formulate the theory so as to deal with this problem, the quantum measurement problem, was initiated by Hugh Everett III in the 1950s. This book gives a careful and challenging examination and evaluation of the work of Everett and those who have followed him. The informal approach, minimizing technicality, makes the book accessible and illuminating for philosophers and physicists alike.

Subjective Bayesianism is one of the most popular tools of contemporary epistemology, using probability mathematics to provide comprehensive rational constraints both for an agent’s degrees of belief at a given time and for the evolution of those degrees of belief over time. Yet Conditionalization (the traditional Bayesian updating rule) has trouble modeling cases involving memory loss and context-sensitivity, because these cases involve the loss of certainties over time. This book proposes a new Bayesian modeling framework, the Certainty-Loss Framework (or CLF), that yields correct verdicts about rational requirements in such cases. The framework resolves a variety of outstanding problems for Bayesianism, including the Sleeping Beauty Problem concerning self-locating beliefs and difficulties squaring Bayesianism with Everettian interpretations of quantum mechanics. CLF is developed within a carefully-articulated formal modeling methodology that focuses our attention on the boundaries of our models’ applicability and the precise relation between formal systems and norms. The result is a framework that merges the advantages of formal modeling with the complexities of everyday epistemic life.

This book in the philosophy of law and risk assessment is concerned with the topic of the standards of evidence in legal proceedings and regulatory decisions regarding the toxicity of chemicals. The book argues that the scientific and statistical criteria usually used to determine whether substances are toxic are too rigorous and time-consuming for evidentiary purposes in tort cases and for regulation. The result is the under-regulation of toxic substances and the under-compensation of plaintiffs in tort cases. The book proposes the evidential standards now used should be evaluated with the purposes of the law in mind.