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Explanations and candidate explanations in physics

  • Paper in Philosophy of the Natural Sciences
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Abstract

There has been a growing trend to include non-causal models in accounts of scientific explanation. A worry addressed in this paper is that without a higher threshold for explanation there are no tools for distinguishing between models that provide genuine explanations and those that provide merely potential explanations. To remedy this, a condition is introduced that extends a veridicality requirement to models that are empirically underdetermined, highly-idealised, or otherwise non-causal. This condition is applied to models of electroweak symmetry breaking beyond the Standard Model.

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Notes

  1. This paper is primarily aimed at scientific explanations in physics. I will make no claims about explanation in biology or other disciplines. However, I believe a similar exposition to a variety of case studies in different scientific disciplines could be fruitful for assessing the condition I introduce, but it is simply outside the scope of this paper.

  2. I have here restricted the explanandum to this problem, but similar stories could be told about the role of the SM Higgs in generating masses of other particles.

  3. There are many physicists who contributed to the development of the Higgs mechanism and I once again refer the reader to Borrelli (2015) for a more careful historical treatment.

  4. Higgs avoided the problem of the massless boson by showing that the transversely polarized vector fields and the longitudinally polarized Goldstone field combine to become the components of a massive vector field. This was also shown with different emphases by Englert and Brout (1964) and Guralnik et al. (1964) who are often also credited as the co-discovers of the mass-generation mechanism.

  5. The boson couples to different SM particles with different strengths, resulting in their different masses. All other particles couple universally, i.e. with the same strength.

  6. These categories are not exclusive or exhaustive, but capture a wide range of popular models. Similar breakdowns are presented in Borrelli and Stöltzner (2013), Chall et al. (2019), and Stöltzner (2017).

  7. For more on these groups of EWSB models see Borrelli (2012) and Chall et al. (2019)

  8. This is precisely where I see the confirmation condition stepping in as an analogue for a veridicality condition as it allows us to make distinctions in such cases.

  9. For a more detailed history of subsequent development of the model, see Borrelli (2015).

  10. While I think it is more accurate to compare the EW theories, the same conclusion should follow comparing the SM and some SM’.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the DFG as part of the “Epistemology of the LHC” collaboration (grant FOR 2063). I would like to thank Andrew Wayne as well as Cristin Chall, Peter Mättig, and Michael Stöltzner for valuable discussions and comments on many drafts. I would also like to acknowledge all the members of the “Epistemology of the LHC” research unit for their input.

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  1. Physics Institute, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Martin King

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King, M. Explanations and candidate explanations in physics. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-019-0273-5

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