From reviews of the hardback edition: a deep study of 20th century field ... of the conceptual origins and development of twentieth century field theories, ...

In this essay, I argue that the basic entities in the causally organized hierarchy of entities that quantum field theory describes are not particles but fields. Then I move to discuss, from the perspective of a structural realist, in what sense and to what degree this theoretical construction of fields can be taken as an objective representation of physical reality.

With over 3,500 participants, the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy took as its theme Paideia: Philosophy Educating Humanity. The 10th proceedings volume (of 12) contains 21 contributions from international philosophers on diverse issues in the philosophy of science. A sampling of topics includes reduction in biology, instrumentalism, epistemological positions in the light of truth approximation, and consensus in science. The volume is not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

At this stage of evolution of our discipline, philosophy of science, there seems no single great theme that has attracted the attention of most practitioners in the field. Rather, scholarly works in the field are quite diffused. Traditional topics, such as reductionism and the unity of science, remain to be carefully examined from various perspectives. The debate over realism versus instrumentalism, although dismissed by some as uninteresting and unproductive, is still taken by many active scholars as vital in our understanding (...) of the nature of scientific theories and in our appraisal of scientific enterprise. Of course, the new spirit of our times has also shown itself, sometimes in the discussion of some major theses in the post-empiricist philosophy of science, such as incommensurability, underdetermination and constructivism, on the basis of detailed examination of scientific materials, other times in the shift of the attention from static aspects of science, such as theory justification and the nature of explanation, to more dynamic aspects, such as negotiations within a scientific community and its function and role in the development of science. Even more to the point in this regard is the great attention paid to the place science has occupied in modernity, the defect of modernist understanding of science and its possible remedy. Not surprisingly, this current state of affairs in our field has also manifested in the essays collected in this volume of contributions to the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. Thus, an inspection of these essays, although it will not provide us with a focus of the discipline, may give us some sense as to what is going on in the field. (shrink)

Motivated by the developments in contemporary mathematical physics and the related interpretive and historiographical works on these developments, a structuralist and historically constitutive and constructive approach to scientific realism is proposed to address the challenges Thomas Kuhn raised against scientific realism, and to remove the defects of the currently available dissatisfactory responses the structuralists put forward to the challenges. The paper shows that SHASR productively exploits the insights from both Kuhn’s historicism and his critics’ structuralism, while avoids the traps in (...) both traditions. Then, after a brief comparison between SHASR and the increasingly popular neo-Kantian post-Kuhnian philosophy of science recommended and defended by Michael Freedman and some others, it concludes with a big picture about the science-world relationship derived from the notion of emergence conceptualized within the framework of SHASR, whose bearings on the Kantian question of the phenomenal - noumenal relationship are worth further explorations. (shrink)

Various theories of referent are critically but briefly surveyed from the perspective of structural realism; a constructivist version of structural realist account of referent is outlined, and its implications for history of science and for descriptive metaphysics are briefly indicated.

The creation of QCD is one of greatest achievements in the history of science. It has radically changed our conception of the fundamental ontology of the physical world and its underlying dynamics. What it has discovered are more than new particles and a new force, but rather a deeper level of physical reality, a new kind of entities. Dynamically, the strong nuclear forces are no longer taken to be fundamental, but are relegated to the status of the un-cancelled residue of (...) far stronger long range force mediated by gluon. From a long term perspective, perhaps more important than these discoveries is that it breaks a new path to explore many novel features of an unknown layer of the physical world, such as instanton, the theta vacuum and effective energy. The notion of effective energy allows us to conceptualize the mysterious quantum number flow and hadronization. Although the metaphysical status of effective energy is not quite clear at this moment, but a window is open for conceptualizing the physical world that is in complex processes of transmutations in a unified way. (shrink)

The failure of the statist models of socialism poses a challenge to socialists in conceiving a feasible non-statist model. In taking up the challenge, guided by Marx’s ideas that socialism will be the outcome of the struggles of the working classes in response to their capitalist conditions of existence; and its two pillars are “social property” and “conscious social regulation,” which ensure its superiority over capitalism, the defining feature of the contemporary financial capitalism together with Marx’s two concepts underlying the (...) two pillars are taken into consideration, and a framework of socializing economic activities grounding a non-statist model of socialism is suggested, whose ontological foundation and operational logic, guided by socialist norms and regulated by the Marxian associations, are different from that of capitalism. (shrink)