Conference activity

Bertrand Russell is well known for his causal eliminativism in his celebrated On The Notion of Cause (1912), a view he famously expressed by his claim that causation is retained as an important scientific notion only because, like the monarchy, people assume it to do no harm. On this view metaphysically fundamental scientific theories, such as mathematical physics, dispense with the notion of cause in their fundamental physical laws. However, years later in The Analysis of Matter (1927) and Human Knowledge (1948) Russell returned to the discussion of causation and argues for the following two views, which are prima facie incompatible with each other and incompatible with his earlier claim. First, that there are separable causal lines which should be identified with physically distinguished geodesics in relativistic space-time (1927, 1948) and that, (2) causation is a fundamental postulate in non-demonstrative scientific inference (1948) in his epistemic structural realism. These two claims seem inconsistent with Russell’s main claim in On The Notion of Cause, but in this talk I will argue, after elaborating on these theses, that these are compatible with each other and with Russell’s earlier eliminativistic thesis. Furthermore I explain how these views result from the logical atomist research program (Landini, 2014; Klement, 2017; Elkind, 2019).

Here, wedeal with the role that Quasi-set theory might play vis-à-vis rational understanding of the scientific and metaphysical elements of quantum mechanics. Broadly speaking, scientific understanding is considered to be knowledge of relations of dependence. When oneunderstands a theory, one can build a comprehensive picture of that theory as well as of the relations that hold within it. Understanding a theory allows scientists to f ind new domains of application for it, and understanding an empirical domain makes it possible to build new theoretical approaches to that domain. 

Science is generally concerned with explanation,prediction,manipulation,and actual knowledge of what the world is like.This last factor is metaphysical in nature, for metaphysics is concerned ultimately with the question of what the world is fundamentally like. Therefore, it is undeniable that scientific understanding is a fundamental component of any successful scientific enterprise. So far, understanding has been considered to be factive and explanatory, meaning that its content should only include true propositions and that it should come only after the achievement of explanatory knowledge. 

Unfortunately, if this were the case, however, we wouldn’t be able to legitimately understand any theories, models, or phenomena that are formulated in a defective manner. At least we wouldn’t be able to do understand them qua defective —yet, if there was no need for understanding defective theories, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, many of our most successful scientific theories, at some point in their development, are or have been defective. Some of them, like Bohr’s model of the atom, have been, allegedly, inconsistent. Some others have conflicted significantly with observation, like Newtonian dynamics. And some others, like Quantum Mechanics, are conceptually vague and imprecise, as well as (depending on the philosophical reconstruction) inconsistent (Cf. arenhart; krause, 2014; da costa; krause, 2014). 

This shows that much scientific practice has used and uses defective theories and models. And even more importantly, these theories, even when defective, have grounded and shaped our current science. And yet, while philosophers of science scrutinized the rationality behind using defective theories, they have significantly struggled when explaining how, if possible, to achieve any legitimate understanding of them.

Here,we deal with the question of under which circumstances can scientists achieve a legitimate understanding of defective theories qua defective. We claim that scientists understand a theory if they can recognize the theory’s underlying inference pattern(s) and if they can reconstruct and explain what is going on in specific cases of defective theories as well as consider what the theory would do if not defective–even before finding ways of fixing it. Moreover, we claim that understanding the inferential structure of the theory involves understanding the structure of its domain.

 Furthermore, this understanding is modal in nature, in that the domain might not actually instantiate that structure, the structure need only be possible. This last point we illustrate with specific reference to quantum mechanics. In order to do so, we proceed in four steps.

• First, we introduce the generalities of scientific understanding and we discuss the challenges around the legitimate understanding of defective theories; here we also introduce our case study.- 

• Second, we sketch a structuralist approach to understanding and elaborate on what sort of presuppositions from metaphysics and meta-metaphysics are required by this type of approach.

• Third, we explain in which way the detection of specific inferential patterns and logical constraints allows for the promotion of scientific understanding in the case of the quantum theory with non-individuality (Cf. krause; french, 1995; arenhart; krause, 2014).

• Finally, we draw some conclusions.

My central thesis is that Russell’s structural realism was never vulnerable to Newman’s objection. The defense of this thesis necessitates an in-depth explanation of Russell’s structural realism, with the aim of clearing up persistent confusion from the current consensus in the philosophy of science. 

I contend that Russell’s misunderstood 1928 response to Newman contains the key to understanding the deep interconnections between Russell’s logic, metaphysics and philosophy of science within his structural realism (1927, 1948) which in turn vindicates his proposed solution. 

The paper goes over the details of Newman’s objection in the context of Russell’s work: his structural realism, philosophies of physics and mind. By piecing these elements together, in light of Russell’s 1928 response to Newman, I argue that from what we know on model-theoretic arguments, Russell was right about what was required, in his assumptions, to avoid the problem. I show these assumptions were explicit in The Analysis of Matter ([AMt], 1927) and in turn presuppose his metaphysics of neutral monism. 

Lastly, I show, against the consensus, that Russell never abandoned structural realism, as evidenced by the fact that he returned to discuss Newman’s objection in Human Knowledge ([HK], 1948), in a manner that preserves all key ingredients of his 1928 solution, something previous commentators have failed to notice. I argue that his resulting position, while contentful enough to avoid Newman’s objection, does not collapse into either scientific realism or antirealism. This suggests that a Russellian approach to structural realism remains possible.

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Russell’s work in philosophy of science has been a subject of renewed interest since the publication of Demopulos and Friedman’s (1985) where they drew important connections between Russell’s theory of theories: structural realism and the issue of realism in philosophy of science. In this talk I argue that if we fill out the details of a Russellian structuralist approach to science by adding some very plausible assumptions to the logic plus some extra-logical assumptions about possible perceivers in the manner in which Russell intended (1948) then it is possible to extend the explanatory power of ESR to cover at least some of the objects of classical physics e.g. spacetime and it is to be expected that additional assumptions pertinent to the relevant domains in very much in the spirit of the program should be capable of generalization to the rest of the sciences. In this sense, it is possible for the Russellian ’s to solve at least one of the problems of broadly understood defective information: the problem of incomplete information.  

Russell’s structuralist approach grows directly out of the relation-arithmetic developed by himself and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica (1910) and his attempt to relate the logico-mathematical techniques developed in that work to the problem of the applicability of mathematics, particularly to physical science. Russell (1919, 1927, 1998) mentions at least three relevant aspects: 

• (i) inasmuch as a mathematical theory can be said to be true of a domain of objects whenever they satisfy some formal structure, then it doesn’t matter what are the specific objects which satisfy the axioms nor whether they are complex or simple and 

• (ii) given some epistemic assumptions regarding the physical world involving the relation of percepts to their causes (Helmholtz-Weyl; Mirroring Relations), it is possible for us to know a great deal about its structure, if by structure we understand the notion on similarity of relations; 

• (iii) the relational structures in the world are of the same logicaltype as perceived relations given co-punctuality between percepts and non-percepts.

 These elements make Russell an epistemic structural realist (ESRist). The ESRist who intends to use a Russellian upward approach (Votsis, 2005) will distinguish between observables and unobservables in the indirect realist sense and furthermore will be committed to the claim that scientific knowledge of the world’s structure obtains in virtue of the Helmholtz-Weyl principle (different effects, different causes) and the Mirroring RelationsPrinciple (relations in the world mirror the logico-mathematical properties of relations between percepts). But if so, how can this sort of structural realist explain defective scientific (incomplete) information? How does the relation-arithmetic structural account of science, of the Russellian ESRist accommodate that possibility which doesn’t easily fit the classical logicomathematical notion of structure? How is such a possibility explicable by appeal to the very slim epistemological anchor afforded by the assumed truth of HW & MR? 

What is missing for a full-fledged development of his structuralism amounts to: (i) an explicit characterization of distinguished structure which allows for an objective distinction between intended and unintended attributions of structure to the physical world i.e. some notion of Naturalness or Foundedness (Lewis, 1983; Demopoulos & Friedman, 1985); (ii) a thorough investigation of how his method of dividing problems in: logical, physical and epistemic (Russell, 1914; 1927) can solve philosophical problems in physics when embedded in this framework and (iii) an extension of the methodology from a very solipsistic basis to a methodology encompassing data outside one physical body (1927, 1948). In this talk I discuss these points explicitly connecting the approach Russell undertook in The Analysis of Matter to his project for developing postulates of non-demonstrative inference in Human Knowledge (1948) and show the fertility of these assumptions by investigating how it is possible to in broad outlines recover physical space-time (Maudlin, 2012) as an artifact of representation. It has been argued in the literature on the philosophy of space and time (Maudlin, 2012; Dasgupta, 2015) that Leibnizian arguments either show that there are multiple empirically indiscernible possibilities for a space-time to be or redundant structural elements in our fundamental space-time theories given substantivalist assumptions and that relationism is unworkable. I will close this talk by suggesting ways in which the artifactualism borne out of a Russellian ESRist approach can ameliorate some of the discomforts inasmuch as some of the assumptions required by our representations necessarily give rise to artifacts of representation with redundant structure somewhere, but that this is a feature in this case and doesn’t carry heavy-duty metaphysical burdens.