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Download Interpreting Physics: Language and the Classical/Quantum by Edward MacKinnon PDF

By Edward MacKinnon

This ebook is the 1st to supply a scientific account of the function of language within the improvement and interpretation of physics. An historical-conceptual research of the co-evolution of mathematical and actual suggestions ends up in the classical/quatum interface. Bohrian orthodoxy stresses the indispensability of classical innovations and the practical function of arithmetic. This e-book analyses methods of extending, after which going past this orthodoxy orthodoxy. eventually, the e-book analyzes how a revised interpretation of physics affects on uncomplicated philosophical concerns: conceptual revolutions, realism, and reductionism.

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Extra resources for Interpreting Physics: Language and the Classical/Quantum Divide

Sample text

This sets the general perspective for the historical analysis that follows. Our basic concern is with the historical process through which the language of physics developed. This is usually done, in a whiggish fashion, by focusing on the development of mathematics, physics, and astronomy in the ancient world, or by tracing the gradual References 23 emergence of ideas that now have a foundational role in science such as atomism, as in my earlier survey (MacKinnon 1982), or of evolution. Such approaches effectively detach the ‘real’ development of science from the hurly-burly of the lived world.

Too much stress on nature and necessity seemed to limit the power of God. A reaction set in gradually leading to a quantitative spatio-temporal description of bodies and an explanation of their activities in terms of external forces, rather than internal natures. In treating these developments, I am primarily concerned with their effect in modifying and extending the conceptual core of ordinary language. This too presents problems. To speak of a conceptual core found in different languages seems to imply what Davidson has dubbed the third dogma of empiricism.

For this reason I will begin with a preliminary orientation indicating the purpose behind the selections. Standard historical accounts pick out two periods that played a formative role in the emergence of science: Greece of the golden age, when philosopher-scientists developed the idea of a rational explanation of natural events; and the late Renaissance, when scientists wedded quantitative concepts to mathematical accounts. I do not dispute this, but I wish to put it in a different perspective.

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