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28 Jul
Dissertation Defense-Shahin Kaveh
Event Type

Defenses

Target Audience

Faculty, Graduate Students

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Dissertation Defense-Shahin Kaveh

This is a past event.

A Prescriptivist Account of Physical Theories

A question of central importance to any philosopher of science is: what is the essential content of a scientific theory? What does a given theory really tell us about the world? Philosophers of science have disagreed on many aspects of the answer to this question, for instance whether the essential content of theories concerns entities, properties, or structures, whether it should be cashed out in terms of sentences or models, and whether one should be a realist or an anti-realist about this content; but philosophers have near-universally agreed on one claim: that theories provide a description of the natural system to which they are applied. Call this the descriptive-ontological view. I argue against the descriptive-ontological view in physics and propose an alternative: the prescriptive-dynamical view. According to the latter, the essential content of a physical theory is to provide prescriptions for interfacing with the natural system. More precisely, physical theories consist of a fixed part and an open-ended part, such that the fixed part is a prescription for constructing the open-ended part from local data, gathered through interaction with the system. The answer to the question of essential content directly determines or at least influences one's response to many other crucial questions such as theoretical equivalence (Chapter 2), theory-world relations (Chapter 3), and realism-antirealism (Chapter 4), which I will subsequently explore. Moreover, as I will argue (Chapter 5), the prescriptive-dynamical account also sheds fresh light on the history of quantum mechanics. In particular, the prescriptive-dynamical account allows us to understand the history of Bohr and Heisenberg’s work in the 1920s as a painstaking realization that instead of telling us what there is, physical theories must tell us what to do.

Wednesday, July 28 at 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Virtual Event

Dissertation Defense-Shahin Kaveh

A Prescriptivist Account of Physical Theories

A question of central importance to any philosopher of science is: what is the essential content of a scientific theory? What does a given theory really tell us about the world? Philosophers of science have disagreed on many aspects of the answer to this question, for instance whether the essential content of theories concerns entities, properties, or structures, whether it should be cashed out in terms of sentences or models, and whether one should be a realist or an anti-realist about this content; but philosophers have near-universally agreed on one claim: that theories provide a description of the natural system to which they are applied. Call this the descriptive-ontological view. I argue against the descriptive-ontological view in physics and propose an alternative: the prescriptive-dynamical view. According to the latter, the essential content of a physical theory is to provide prescriptions for interfacing with the natural system. More precisely, physical theories consist of a fixed part and an open-ended part, such that the fixed part is a prescription for constructing the open-ended part from local data, gathered through interaction with the system. The answer to the question of essential content directly determines or at least influences one's response to many other crucial questions such as theoretical equivalence (Chapter 2), theory-world relations (Chapter 3), and realism-antirealism (Chapter 4), which I will subsequently explore. Moreover, as I will argue (Chapter 5), the prescriptive-dynamical account also sheds fresh light on the history of quantum mechanics. In particular, the prescriptive-dynamical account allows us to understand the history of Bohr and Heisenberg’s work in the 1920s as a painstaking realization that instead of telling us what there is, physical theories must tell us what to do.

Wednesday, July 28 at 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Virtual Event

Event Type

Defenses

Target Audience

Faculty, Graduate Students

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