Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 4, HT24)
Thursday 8 February, 3pm
Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Adam Caulton (Oxford): 'Reduction and Equivalence: Some mild suggestions'
In this talk, I consider a topic in the philosophy of science and physics that has been dominant since the days of logical empiricism: namely inter-theoretic reduction and theoretical equivalence. I explore the reason why (something like) Nagel's model still survives to this day, and suggest that an essential idea in that model is that it makes the recovery of the reduced theory to the reducing theory inevitable in some strong sense. Taking that idea seriously, I argue, places two constraints on reduction (and equivalence) that are often underplayed or ignored: (i) that so-called "bridge laws" are not only needed, but they need to be something approximating analytic truths; and (ii) that some suitably strict account of construction needs to be articulated, or at least obeyed. Both (i) and (ii) might be thought to be wedded to the syntactic account of theories; I will argue otherwise. Finally, and related to (i) and (ii), a more faithful consideration of what physical theories are actually like suggests that we cannot focus purely on a theory's dynamical solutions (or "DPMs"). I hope to illustrate these points with some examples, including Boltzmann's combinatorial argument in deriving the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution in kinetic theory, and John Winnie's 1977 attempt to reduce the structure of Minkowski spacetime to the causal connectibility relation.
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