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Idealizations and Concretizations in Laws and Explanations in Physics

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Abstract

The paper tries to provide an alternative to Hempel’s approach to scientific laws and scientific explanation as given in his D-N model. It starts with a brief exposition of the main characteristics of Hempel’s approach to deductive explanations based on universal scientific laws and analyzes the problems and paradoxes inherent in this approach. By way of solution, it analyzes the scientific laws and explanations in classical mechanics and then reconstructs the corresponding models of explanation, as well as the types of scientific laws appearing in it. Finally, it compares this reconstruction with the approaches of J. Woodward and C. Hitchcock, C. Liu and with the views of M. Thalos on analytic mechanics.

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Notes

  1. The same approach was given in his paper “Le problème de la verité” (1937, p. 219) and in his “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942, pp. 231–232).

  2. For a complete list of counterexamples to the D-N model see Salmon (1990, pp. 47–49).

  3. The view that scientific explanations are arguments was labeled by Salmon in his (1977) as the third dogma of empiricism.

  4. That scientific laws are always explicitly stated as pertaining to a certain kind of entities was for the time explicitly taken into account, to best of my knowledge, in Fisk (1970), Nowak (1972), and Stinchcombe (1973).

  5. For an analysis of Galileo’s formulation of the law for simple pendulum see, e.g., Naylor (1974a).

  6. We draw here partially on Such (1978).

  7. On this see Such (1978).

  8. For the sake of simplicity I presuppose here that all idealizations are abolished. Usually, the law of the type L (0) is too complex to be derived and the concretization-sequence starting in L (l) ends in laws of the type L (j), so that l > j > 0.

  9. On singular initial and boundary conditions see, e.g., Sklar (1991), Wilson (1991), and Frisch (2004).

  10. I suppose here, for the sake of simplicity, that one can abolish one idealization after the another and is thus not forced to abolish several idealizations at once as, e.g., in the case, given above, of the simultaneous abolishment of the idealizations that there is no resistance of the environment and that the suspended body is a mass-point.

  11. On this see, e.g., Bunge (1964).

  12. Rott identifies such a “double” existence for Kepler’s laws in Rott (1990).

  13. See, e.g., Naylor (1974b) and Drake (1973).

  14. In order not to overburden this figure I do not place the arrows at the very top to indicate the epistemic relation between the singular appearances, the general appearances with their laws of appearances. I view the singular appearances as the presupposition for the statement of the general appearances together with their laws of appearances and as the explanatory consequence of the laws of appearances.

  15. As primary candidates for such theories seem to be theories of evolutions, e.g., evolutionary cosmology and evolutionary biology.

  16. Such insertion would contradict also the historical facts: the modern concept of mass appears for the first time only in Newton’s Principia, where also for the first time reflections on the masses of the planets, at least in their mutual ratios, are made.

  17. For various approaches to idealizations in scientific theories see, e.g., Barr (1971, 1974), Nowak (1980, 1992), Nowakowa (1994), Nowakowa and Nowak (2000), Lind (1993), Haase (1995), and Teller (2004).

  18. It seems that Liu draws here on Laymon who speaks about the set I which should “represent the idealizing assumptions. Include into I the required parameters or initial condition values” (1985, p. 148), and about a “more realistic specification of initial and boundary conditions” (1989, p. 359).

  19. We draw here upon (Ter Haar 1971).

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Acknowledgements

This paper was written under the VEGA research grant number 1/3591/06.

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Hanzel, I. Idealizations and Concretizations in Laws and Explanations in Physics. J Gen Philos Sci 39, 273–301 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9073-x

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