theory and truth philosophical critique within foundational science apr 2002

[...]... formation, and philosophical critique all interact in the body of science itself I will claim that by exploring such issues as ontological elimination grounded in empiricist critique, the critical exploration of the relationship between a science treating of ideals and the real systems under study, and the critical understanding of our current theories as mere way-stations in an ongoing and changing science, ... vital role in understanding general relativity as well For in this theory, aspects of the geometry of spacetime play the role of potentials and forces Understanding these aspects of the theory from the critical perspective is crucial to understanding the theory philosophically, and such understanding plays a significant role both in the history of the framing of general relativity and in present projects... appearance within the practice of fundamental science itself It is then argued that when these philosophical themes appear within the development and critique of fundamental theory within science, they take on a very different aspect from how they appear in more abstract methodological practice Specifically, the argument focuses on several reasons that have been offered in general philosophy and methodological... transient status—all make their appearance within the scientific context of the framing, testing, adjudicating, and revising of theories within foundational physics itself I will argue that various kinds of reasoning that we normally think of as philosophical are deeply embedded in the very practice of science This embedding of 8 Theory and Truth philosophy in science can be clearly seen only when one... pragmatism, see Putnam (1978) and Putnam (1990) For doubts about scientific truth founded on science' s need to idealize see Cartwright (1983) Two classics that emphasize the radical transience of science and infer from that profound philosophical consequences are Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1962.) 2 Ontological Elimination i ONTOLOGICAL ELIMINATION FOUNDED ON CRITIQUE Both philosophers and scientists frequently... elimination that go on within science, in all their local and contextual nature, that I want to pay attention to, and not the global philosophical reinterpretive programs Let me begin by simply noting a number of themes I will try to develop shortly (i) Eliminative reinterpretation of theory as it functions within foundational physics is always motivated by special features of the experimental and theoretical... physical science, empirical and conceptual, must be attended to exhaustively and with care if we are really to understand how any of the critical philosophical themes show up in science itself But in this book I clearly cannot hope to deal with the notoriously complex and difficult foundational problems in relativistic spacetime theories, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, or quantum field theory. .. "OBSERVATIONAL CONTENT" AND OF THE ELIMINATION OF THE UNOBSERVABLE There is, then, a pervasive need within foundational physics to extract from a theory its observational consequences and delimit which parts of the theory outrun any legitimate role in deriving the Ontological Elimination Z 3 theory' s empirical consequences Such a process of separating out the theory into its empirically necessary and empirically... that very general epistemic (and semantic) considerations function in specific scientific decisions concerning theory constructions and justifications casts doubt upon some versions of "naturalism" or "quietism" with regard to science that try to tell us that scientific theories are perfectly understandable on their own and never in need of philosophical interpretation or critique (6) Finally, an exploration... aspects in the usual abstract way and the consideration of them in the more contextual and theory- specific way to be emphasized here I will suggest that the global philosophical questions and the answers proposed to them may themselves stand to the more local issues as some form of limiting ideal This obser- Theory and Truth 9 vation may provide some useful insights into how to think about the global problems .