יום ב' 2.1.2006, 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 449 בנין גילמן

במסגרת קולוקוויום בר הילל

Professor Margaret C. Morrison, University of Toronto

"Unification Revisited: The Role of Dynamical Principles"

Commentator: Dr. Orly Shenker, The Open University of Israel

If one looks at the philosophy of science literature in the last ten years or so one sees a tremendous emphasis on the role of models as the explanatory and representational vehicles for physical phenomena. In fact, one might think that theories as general frameworks for understanding physical systems have simply been banished from the landscape, replaced by local models that pay attention to specific features of the context at hand. Even when theory is lurking in the background, the focus of philosophical discussion seems to centre on how the theory’s models function as the source of information. And, in many cases we are reminded that theory does not function as the background source of information provided by the models; instead the models are sometimes inconsistent with each other and with aspects of the background theories that are thought to govern the phenomena they describe. One of the things this emphasis on models seems to suggest is a disunified view of the physical world.

In contemporary physics what we have seems to be a mixture of partly unified theories and a plethora of models that fill in various gaps. But does that mean that we live in a disordered and disunified world? The answer, I think, is no and to think otherwise is to tie our notion of unity too close to reduction and derivations from so-called ‘fundamental theory’. I argued in Unifying Scientific Theories that there are many different kinds and conceptions of unity and that the process of unifying theories was heavily reliant on the kinds of mathematical structures we have at our disposal. But, I now think there is an additional and perhaps more substantial notion of unity that needs to be articulated , one that explains relations among different kinds of phenomena, and is present even in cases where reduction and first principle deductions seemingly fail. Morever, it is this unity that explains certain kinds of stable behaviour described in our models. In this talk I outline why we shouldn’t equate unity with reduction and then go on to sketch a different way of thinking about unity that incorporates a good deal of the current thinking about physical theory, and does so in a way that leaves the world ordered but extremely complex. It is now fairly widely thought that the reductionist picture of science is problematic at best, yet there is a variety of evidence that the physical world seems to be interconnected in different and surprising ways. The challenge is to explicate and account of the latter without the difficulties of the former.

פרופ' ליאו קורי, יו"ר