Online research in philosophy

Preanalytically, we are all scientific realists. But both philosophers and scientists become uncomfortable when forced into analysis. In the case of scientists, this discomfort often arises from practical difficulties in setting out a carefully described set of objects which adequately account for the phenomena with which they are concerned. This paper offers a set of representative examples of these difficulties for contemporary physicists. These examples challenge the traditional realist vision of mature scientific activity as struggling toward an ontologically well-defined world (...) picture. They challenge antirealist alternatives as well. (shrink)

John Earman's A Primer on Determinism treats the doctrine of Laplacian determinism by a careful look at a considerable variety of physical theories. This paper enriches Earman's discussion of chaos theory by considering in some detail the analysis of dripping faucets due to Robert Shaw. Shaw's analysis exhibits in a nice way some of the techniques used in chaos theory and gives a feel for research in this area. The paper concentrates on the tension between the determinism inherent (...) in any description involving differential equations and the in-practice (any practice) unpredictability resulting from the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions of the non-linear differential equations characteristic of chaos theory. (shrink)

Pre-analytically, we are all scientific realists. But both philosophers and scientists become uncomfortable when forced into analysis. In the case of scientists, this discomfort often arises from quite practical difficulties in setting out a carefully described set of objects and their properties which adequately account at least for the phenomena with which they and those in their research specialty are concerned. I offer a set of representative examples of these difficulties for contemporary physicists. These examples challenge the traditional realist vision (...) of mature scientific activity as struggling toward a clear and ontologically well-defined world picture. (shrink)

Among the principles that are generally taken to underlie the general theory of relativity is a general principle of relativity. Such a principle is supposed to extend the special principle of relativity, which holds observers in uniform motion to be indistinguishable by appeal to the laws of physics, to a requirement on observers in arbitrary states of motion. Starting with physical intuitions described graphically by Galileo, proceeding through a series of formal requirements on reference frames defined on models of space-time (...) theories, and considering other "observations" commonly associated with relativity principles, this paper argues that the general principle of relativity is neither justified by "fact", nor exemplified by the general theory of relativity. (shrink)