Logic and the Philosophy of Science

While logic has sometimes tended to lead to oversimplification and abstraction, it has also made it possible to refine philosophical problems pertaining to science so as to give them rigor and precision, and in some cases, to solve them definitively. There are too many different cases to provide a helpful overview, so I will discuss several examples that I have found especially telling concerning the value of logic. I will take up two issues concerning definability and one issue in epistemology. They concern the problem of understanding theoretical terms in physics and what is known as the problem of old evidence. 1 The Problem of ‘Implicit’ Definability How theoretical terms are related to what we can observe and measure has been a recurrent problem in philosophy of science. When the theoretical scene changes, new terms appear and to understand what they mean seems to require learning the new theories, as if they can only be understood ‘from within’ those new theories. I will begin with a famous historical example. In the 17th century, Cartesians considered Newton’s introduction of the new concepts of mass and force a return to the ‘occult qualities’ of the medievals. In the 19th century, however, there were sustained efforts to provide reductive accounts of those concepts. Mach’s work is the best known. His attempt and its difficulties presaged the wider ranging controversies about theoretical terms in our own time, which we will address in turn. 1.1 Attempted definitions of mass In the context of classical physics, all measurements are reducible to series of measurements of time and position, so we may designate as basic Split by PDF Splitter