Abstract
By briefly reviewing three well-known scientific revolutions in fundamental physics (the discovery of inertia, of special relativity and of general relativity), I claim that problems that were supposed to be crying for a dynamical explanation in the old paradigm ended up receiving a structural explanation in the new one. This claim is meant to give more substance to Kuhn’s view that revolutions are accompanied by a shift in what needs to be explained, while suggesting at the same time the existence of a pattern that is common to all of the discussed case-studies. It remains to be seen whether also quantum mechanics, in particular entanglement, conforms to this pattern.
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Notes
In the revolutionary cases that he analyses, Janssen (2002b) is reluctant to identify Common Origin Inferences with Common-Cause Inferences, although in his (2002a) he seems definitely inclined to do so. My view is that causation did not play any role (at least in one sense of “causation”) in the discovery of the new theories.
The problem is whether relativistic contractions and dilations, and other experimental phenomena concerning relativity should be understood dynamically, as Brown (2005) and Brown and Pooley (2006) have it, or kinematically, as Balashov and Janssen (2003), Norton (2008), Janssen (2009) and Dorato and Felline (2010) have it. Here I will simply assume that the kinematical reading is correct.
The extendibility to other natural sciences seems an even more remote possibility.
For a thorough and extremely clear introduction to metaphysical theories of causation, see Schaffer (2014).
As Norton has it: “If we demand a causal explanation that draws on a primitive notion of causation, then we are conjuring up a dubious level of causal metaphysics that must be supposed to be antecedent to science. Successful explication of that notion of cause has eluded us for millennia” (2008, p. 824, n. 5). For a contrary view, see Frisch (2009).
Here the choice of terminology can be misleading: McMullin (1978, p. 139) defines structural explanations by referring to causal language.
The distinction is widely used in the philosophy of space and time at least since Friedman (1983).
According to various philosophers, a general relativistic spacetime is to be identified with the manifold, since the metric field is a “physical” field (Belot and Earman 2001).
Interestingly, also Brown, despite his position on dynamical accounts of relativistic effect, agrees with me in thinking that the distinction between natural and non-natural motions has an important role to play in the history of physics: “GR is the first in the long line of dynamical theories, based on that profound Aristotelian distinction between natural and forced motion, that explains inertial motion” (2005, p.141).
For the importance of structuralist understandings of spacetime physics, see also North (2009, p. 68)
If laws are postulates, a quotation from Goethe taken from a letter written on 9.8.1828 to his friend Karl F. Zelter becomes relevant: “the greatest art in the life of the world and of culture consists in the ability to transform a problem into a postulate.”
Roughly, an affine space is a vector space from which one removes the origin. A vector is therefore specified up to translations.
Possible generalizations of this claim will be discussed in the remainder of this section.
The question that I cannot discuss in this context is whether the gravitational law ought to be regarded as structural or causal. According to Kuhn, Newton’s law of gravitation was initially received as a merely structural explanation, especially among the followers of Descartes, but physicists later got used to it: “[. . .] in physics new canons of explanation are born with new theories on which they are, to a considerable extent, parasitic”. (Kuhn 1977, p. 29).
I owe this point to one of the referees.
“It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact...That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it” (Janiak 2004, p. 102)
Of course, this holds for classical, non-quantum processes.
Recall that the former raises empirical regularities (like those of thermodynamics) to universal principles, while the latter looks for deeper theories (like those of statistical mechanics) that can explain such regularities (Einstein 1919).
Unlike Norton (2008), Janssen (2009) more convincingly does not presuppose realism about Minkowski spacetime, but insists on the fact that experimental results like the Fresnel drag effect, the velocity dependence of the electron’s mass, and the torques on a moving capacitor in the Trouton–Noble experiment ought to be characterized as kinematical rather than dynamical.
I thank one of the referees for having pointed out to me that the distinction between Principle and Constructive theories can be regarded as independent of the structural/dynamical one.
A “tertium-quid” view between substantivalism and relationism points to a sort of structural spacetime realism (Dorato 2000).
The geodesics deviation equation links the existence of a reciprocal acceleration between geodesics to a non-null Riemann curvature tensor (Wald 1984, pp. 46–47).
See also Nerlich (2010, p. 190).
For instance, as a consequence of a radical theoretical change, he noted how, during the \(17^\mathrm{th}\) century, the search for explanations in terms of occult qualities was replaced by mechanical explanations (Kuhn 1970, p. 104).
Dorato and Felline (2011) is a first stab in this direction.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the two anonymous referees for helpful criticism and suggestions. I also thank the audience in Montreal Cologne, and Bielefeld for their useful suggestions
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Dorato, M. Dynamical versus structural explanations in scientific revolutions. Synthese 194, 2307–2327 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0546-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0546-7