Penn Process Realism in Physics

How Experiment and History Necessitate a Process Ontology
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-078267-7
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 28, 205 Seiten

Reihe: Process Thought

Science should tell us what the world is like. However, realist interpretations of physics face many problems, chief among them the pessimistic meta induction. This book seeks to develop a realist position based on process ontology that avoids the traditional problems of realism. Primarily, the core claim is that in order for a scientific model to be minimally empirically adequate, that model must describe real experimental processes and dynamics. Any additional inferences from processes to things, substances or objects are not warranted, and so these inferences are shown to represent the locus of the problems of realism. The book then examines the history of physics to show that the progress of physical research is one of successive eliminations of thing interpretations of models in favor of more explanatory and experimentally verified process interpretations. This culminates in collections of models that cannot coherently allow for thing interpretations, but still successfully describe processes.

Zielgruppe

Metaphysicians, epistemologists, philosophers of science, histori

Autoren/Hrsg.

Penn, William

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Erkenntnistheorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Metaphysik, Ontologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Naturwissenschaften, Technik, Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie der Mathematik, Philosophie der Physik

Über Autor(innen)

William Penn, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA.