Online research in philosophy

This article surveys the difficulties in establishing determinism for classical physics within the context of several distinct foundational approaches to the discipline. It explains that such problems commonly emerge due to a deeper problem of ‘missing physics'. The Problems of Formalism Norton's Example Three Species of Classical Mechanics 3.1 Mass point physics 3.2 The physics of perfect constraints 3.3 Continuum mechanics Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

This essay traces some of Pierre Duhem's motives for his celebrated "Quine- Duhem thesis" to a specific worry about theory underdetermination that arises within classical mechanics, concerned with the rivalry between Duhem's own thermomechanical approach and the more narrowly "mechanical" treatment pursued by Hertz and others. In the context of the treatments of "physical infinitesimals" common at the time, these two approaches seem empirically indistinguishable. After an exposition of the basic issues, this alleged "underdetermination" is then evaluated from a more (...) modern perspective. (shrink)

This survey article describes Frege's celebrated foundational work against the context of other late nineteenth century approaches to introducing mathematically novel "extension elements" within both algebra and geometry.

There is considerable likelihood that Gottlob Frege began writing his Foundations of Arithmetic with the expectation that he could introduce his numbers, not with sets, but through some algebraic techniques borrowed from earlier writers of the Gottingen school. These rewriting techniques, had they worked, would have required strong philosophical justification provided by Frege's celebrated "context principle," which otherwise serves little evident purpose in the published Foundations.

Attempts to arrange all of classical mechanics upon a self-contained basis encounter difficulties due to "the lousy encyclopedia phenomenon": hard cases involving, e.g., billiard balls, often require that the standard treatments be abandoned in favor of conceptually different accounts. Worse yet, these chains of interdependence often travel in circular loops, where the practitioner is returned to formalisms that she had previously abandoned. However, behaviors of this sort are to be expected if classical doctrine is instead viewed as a "reduced variable" (...) covering of quantum mechanics, which is the point of view that this essay recommends. (shrink)

Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. He combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from a large variety of fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. Wandering Significance offers abundant new insights and perspectives for philosophers of language, mind, and science, and will also reward the interest of psychologists, (...) linguists, and anyone curious about the mysterious ways in which useful language obtains its practical applicability. (shrink)

Many common approximation methods in physics practice 'causal process avoidance' in their operative procedures and such methodologies weave densely throughout the usual fabric of 'classical mechanics'. It is observed that Hume was unable to find any grounding for a robust conception of 'cause' largely because he unwittingly looked in those regions of mechanics where genuine causal processes had already been tacitly expunged.

George Boolos, Crispin Wright, and others have demonstrated how most of Frege's treatment of arithmetic can be obtained from a second-order statement that Boolos dubbed ‘Hume's principle’. This note explores the historical evidence that Frege originally planned to develop a philosophical approach to numbers in which Hume's principle is central, but this strategy was abandoned midway through his Grundlagen.

Physicists often allow the "laws" of a discipline, formulated as partial differential equations, to be disobeyed along various surfaces, arrayed along the boundary and inside the medium under study. What kinds of considerations permit these lapses in the applicability of the equations? This paper surveys a variety of answers found in the physical literature.