OT: Christian relativity - in which I mangle philosophy of science

Iorwerth Thomas · 25 Apr 2006, 09:10 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:10:17 +0100
Subject: (urth) OT: Christian relativity - in which I mangle philosophy
	of science
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370604141507r7e68eaf1udd381e58d452eeb6 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY114-F6E3CCDE5DD1DC0E6F0B90B9BF0 at phx.gbl>

More or less what I intended to say;  thanks!  I'm largely riffing off 
Pierre Duheim, who seemed to have some fairly sensible things to say on the 
subject.

I'll also note (in order to muddy the waters a little) that in some 
formulations of QFT (that of Peskin and Schroder's 'Introduction to Quantum 
Field Theory', for example), the causality of special relativity is 
technically violated, as particles can exhibit space-like propagation, but 
operationally preserved, as observables are defined as commutators between 
different field operators which vanish for spacelike propagators (i.e. 
particles propagate faster than light, but you can't measure them, so it 
doesn't matter).  There probably exist other formalisms that don't exhibit 
this slightly unsatisfactory way of dealing with the problem.

Also, I think that in GR, the universe has a preffered frame of reference, 
but I could be wrong.


>From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>
>On 4/14/06, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > To say that metaphysics is "generally empirically underdetermined" 
>bothers
> > me a little bit, although it may - I am not sure - be perfectly true. It
> > seems to imply that one arrives at metaphysical conclusions by means of
> > empirical investigation, but the metaphysical premises are always there, 
>as
> > it were, ahead of time.
>
>Well, I don't want to be speaking for anyone else but how _I_ read
>"empirically underdetermined" is "there is not sufficient empirical
>data available to determine the correctness of one set of metaphysics
>as over against another;" or, more broadly, "many different metaphysical
>systems can be said to fit the empirical evidence we have to date."
>
>
> > ...[T]he empirical
> > investigation itself gets started on the basis of some metaphysical
> > standpoint or other.
>
>Well, to the extent that epistemology is a branch of metaphysics,
>certainly; empiricism is after all fundamentally an epistemological
>approach to things.
>
>At any rate: the whole sentence --
>
> > The metaphysic that's generally taken to be implied by relativity
> > at present isn't necessarily the one that should be taken to apply
> > in the future (though one can't actually say what that would be),
> > since metaphysics is generally empirically underdetermined.
>
>unpacks in my brain (note again: Not speaking for Iorwerth, just
>riffing out my own interpretation) something like:
>
>Metaphysics has been significantly influenced by the advent of
>modern physics, and especially relativity. (Most philosophers
>don't seem to have really gotten their brains wrapped around
>quantum theory yet; sadly, some philosophers seem to have
>a vague idea that Heisenberg's principle boils down to "the
>experimenter influences the outcome of the experiment," or
>somesuch.) But because we haven't yet fully worked out the
>empirical implications of relativity (and especially because we
>haven't yet reconciled relativity with quantum theory), any
>metaphysics based on relativity is _necessarily_ premature --
>which isn't to say that it may not turn out to be correct for a
>relativistic Universe; but if it is, we can't say yet that it is.
>
>Something like that, anyway.
>
>--Dan'l
>--
>I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
>                         -- St Teresa of Avila
>http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net