Abstract
Semi-realism offers a metaphysics of science based on causal properties. Insofar as these are understood in terms of dispositions for specific relations that comprise the concrete structure of the world it can be regarded as a form of structural realism. And insofar as these properties are ‘sociable’ and cohere into the groupings that comprise the particulars investigated by science, it captures the underlying intuition behind forms of entity realism. However, I shall raise concerns about both these features. I shall suggest that dispositionalism is not an appropriate metaphysics for modern physics and that ‘sociability’ should be understood in terms of the coherence revealed by symmetry principles. I hope to show how we can retain the virtues of semi-realism while dispensing with the problematic elements by recasting it in more thoroughly structuralist terms.
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Notes
This assumes that quiddity based accounts are metaphysically abhorrent. Psillos (2006) attempts to make these more palatable by allowing properties to acquire and lose powers, but this suggestion is also problematic, as we shall see.
Mumford is entirely happy to dispense with scientific laws, arguing—in addition to the above metaphysical considerations—that the wide diversity of laws, law-like principles and so forth in science cannot be captured by an unitary account of them (2004).
Dorato also argues that quantum mechanics supports dispositionalism because quantum states are best seen as relational and indefinite (Dorato 2007). However, being relational does not imply being dispositional and equating the disposition-manifestation relationship with that which holds between being indefinite and being definite, at the very least extends the meaning of dispositional beyond that which is being considered in this paper (see McKitrick 2008).
I am grateful to Kerry McKenzie for discussions on this and related points.
Unless we were to take a further step up the ladder of modality and insist that the introduction of such a test charge is not to introduce a further feature of the possible world we have conceived but is merely a further modal exploration of that world that allows us to add to our conception of it; so the idea would be that the 1/r2 feature associated with Coulomb’s Law can be held to be a feature of our lonely situation but that as a matter of epistemology (in that possible world) it cannot be detected. At this point one might counter-insist on bringing one’s metaphysics into line with the relevant epistemology and that if our only access to the features of charge are through its effects on other charged bodies, then ascribing such features to lonely charges that by stipulation or bare assertion are not able to have any such effects amounts to the elaboration of illegitimate metaphysics.
All this is not to say that physicists should not consider lonely scenarios involving, say, universes with single masses for example (think of the Schwarzchild solution of Einstein’s equations). These are fine for helping to pin down and explore certain physical features but the point, again, is that this does not amount to an appropriate (meta-metaphysical) methodology for establishing the metaphysical nature of properties that features in this, the actual world.
McKitrick (op. cit.) also presses on this supposed distinction, using the example of ‘stability’ in an office building, which Cartwright would not count as a capacity but can hardly be regarded as latent.
So, for example, the dynamics of Yang-Mills theories, considered by Bain, is encoded in both the relevant invariants and in the geometric structures defined over the projective carrying space.
Drewery argues that certain ceteris paribus laws are not subject to this type of account, namely those that state that other things being equal a member of a kind is like other members in possessing a certain property (Drewery 2001). However, Chakravartty understands the traditional counterparts to such statements as ‘definitional generalisations’ and one could extend this to treat Drewery’s examples as ceteris paribus descriptions of objects (and as such would not apply to the fundamental objects of physics anyway).
Impossibility proofs and associated so-called no-go theorems exist which prevent the construction of a theory appropriately combining space–time and internal theories. For a critical discussion that argues that the relevant theorems are physically irrelevant, see Mirman (1969); these theorems do not apply to supersymmetric theories.
My understanding of both the history and philosophical implications of the relevant physics has been significantly enhanced and deepened by the work of Kerry MacKenzie, who has pointed out that the above considerations yield an ontological picture that is significantly different from the so-called ‘bundle’ theory of objects since these symmetry relationships specify both kinds of particles and the compositional relationships that hold between these kinds (cf French 2006, fn 11).
This can then yield a unified account of the sociability of particulars and kinds, citing the relevant symmetries and group-theoretic features as explanans in both cases. In this sense, OSR offers a stronger explanatory framework than that based on object-oriented metaphysics (cf. Chakravartty 2003b).
As Efird and Stoneham note, this ‘clear’ intuition is surely question begging (2010).
Efird and Stoneham make a similar point: if we take a certain object such as a post box then it is not at all intuitive that there could be a ‘near twin’ of a postbox, yet lacking colour and shape. Their conclusion is that Schaffer’s argument is either invalid or fails to be independently suasive (ibid.).
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Angelo Cei and Kerry McKenzie for helpful discussions on these and related topics but my particular thanks go to Anjan of course, whose comments, suggestions, criticisms and support over the years have influenced my views on not just structural realism, but the realist-anti-realist debate and the relationship between metaphysics and the philosophy of science in general. As always, I bear full responsibility for what is to follow.
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French, S. Semi-realism, Sociability and Structure. Erkenn 78, 1–18 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9417-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9417-0