> On Sep 30, 2014, at 9:21 AM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com > <mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote: > > If one is a realist _only_ about things that one doesn't know, then one > implies that the real is not cognizable. I suppose that one could say in a > loose sense that one is partly an instrumentalist about simplified models, > but one may regard such models as still being close to the truth, and thus as > reflecting something nearly real, and in that sense one is not an > instrumentalist. In "On the Logic of Drawing Ancient History from > Documents", EP 2, somewhere in pages 107–9 Peirce speaks of _incomplexity_, > that of a hypothesis that seems too simple but whose trial "may give a good > 'leave,' as the billiard-players say", and be instructive for the pursuit of > various and conflicting hypotheses that are less simple. One could loosely > call that instrumentalism, but to regard the incomplex hypothesis as offering > some degree of promise of leading to a true theory about something real, is > not instrumentalism. > >
The way this is often dealt with is via convergence - traditional scientific realism being one example. I’m not sure this implies the real is not cognizable, although that’s definitely been a position. (Wasn’t Dummett’s views on realism tied to that? A set with one uncognizable element - it’s been too long since I read him) There are other solutions of course - Heisenberg actually wrote a little book discussing objects like tables and then fundamental objects. It’s been years since I read it so I don’t want to say too much about it. I vaguely recall it being a kind of realism that allows macro-objects to be real. But I may be misrecalling that. Whether the “nearly real” is good enough is a reasonable question. Like you, I see it as good enough, but I think there are important caveats one has to make which is why I mentioned that on practical grounds for many entities they act like instrumentalists. > Peirce makes the distinction between mechanical qualities and qualities of > feeling, see CP 1.422-426, circa 1896. Particularly interesting is that here > he calls qualities generals - but qualities only as reflected on. > http://www.textlog.de/4282.html <http://www.textlog.de/4282.html> . Thanks. I thought he’d said something like that but I couldn’t find it. That’s closer to the distinction I was poorly making. > I'd think that laws of physics are more general than a sensible quality like > 'yellow', which is less widely applicable than the laws of physics in our > known physical universe, even if one does think that sensible qualities are > real. > > Except when discussing 'universal' as understood in physics, it might be > better to stick to 'more general' and 'less general', rather than trying for > a distinction between 'universal' and 'general' that (A) merely involves > different degrees of generality and (B) gets tangled up in terminological > history. It’s a subtle issue that’s hard to get terminology for. (Probably one should do a literature search and see how others have solved it - but I don’t have time for that unfortunately) I’m not sure I like more or less general either since the more or less is in different areas. > Regarding A-time and B-time, I thought that those were questions in > philosophy of physics, not in physics. Do you think that they have something > to do with the unification of space and time in the sense in which that > unification is understood in physics - such as to modify the idea of the > signal speed limit as a common yardstick of space and time? I think the distinction between physics and philosophy of physics is blurry despite many physicists having a negative view of philosophy. Lee Smolin argues that it should be even blurrier and that physicists should pay more attention to philosophy. And it seems often that when physicists do philosophical thinking they often tend to jump in ignorant of what’s been done in philosophy. (I can think of a few major recent works where a little more research in philosophy would have benefited the book significantly) With regards to the A/B debate, I think if there is an absolute time ontologically and measurements just behave akin to time distortion then that implies a lot about time/space relations. I’m very skeptical about such views. I was actually surprised when I first encountered it that there was such a large philosophical literature arguing against a more literal view of GR. I do think these issues end up being pertinent for searching for a grand unified theory. I don’t think most physicists have paid much attention to such things. But then I do notice more and more are appearing at arXiv.org <http://arxiv.org/> so perhaps they are having a bit of an effect. I’m not sure I’m really qualified to say how influential all this is since I’ve been out of physics for quite a few years now.
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