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Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities Founding Editor Leszek Nowak (1943–2009) Editor-in-Chief Katarzyna Paprzycka (University of Warsaw) Editors Tomasz Bigaj (University of Warsaw) – Krzysztof Brzechczyn (Adam Mickiewicz University) – Jerzy Brzeziński (Adam Mickiewicz University) – Krzysztof Łastowski (Adam Mickiewicz University) – Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska (University of Warsaw) Piotr Przybysz (Adam Mickiewicz University) – Mieszko Tałasiewicz (University of Warsaw) – Krzysztof Wójtowicz (University of Warsaw) Advisory Committee Joseph Agassi (Tel-Aviv) – Wolfgang Balzer (München) – Mario Bunge (Montreal) Robert S. Cohen (Boston) – Francesco Coniglione (Catania) – Dagfinn Føllesdal (Oslo, Stanford) – Jaakko Hintikka✝ (Boston) – Jacek J. Jadacki (Warszawa) – Andrzej Klawiter (Poznań) – Theo A.F. Kuipers (Groningen) – Witold Marciszewski (Warszawa) Thomas Müller (Konstanz) – Ilkka Niiniluoto (Helsinki) – Jacek Paśniczek (Lublin) David Pearce (Madrid) – Jan Such (Poznań) – Max Urchs (Wiesbaden) – Jan Woleński (Kraków) – Ryszard Wójcicki (Warszawa) VOLUME 104 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ps Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics Edited by Tomasz Bigaj Christian Wüthrich leiden | boston Cover illustration: Atomium, Brussels, Morguefile Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955686 issn 0303-8157 isbn 978-90-04-30963-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-31082-7 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Tomasz Bigaj and Christian Wüthrich, Introduction . 7 Steven French and Kerry McKenzie, Rethinking Outside the Toolbox: Reflecting Again on the Relationship between Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics . 25 Douglas Kutach, Ontology: An Empirical Fundamentalist Approach . 55 Vincent Lam, Quantum Structure and Spacetime . 81 Dean Rickles and Jessica Bloom, Things Ain’t What They Used to Be . Physics Without Objects . 101 Olimpia Lombardi and Dennis Dieks, Particles in a Quantum Ontology of Properties . 123 Tomasz Bigaj, Essentialism and Modern Physics . 145 Thomas Møller-Nielsen, Symmetry and Qualitativity . 179 Matteo Morganti, Relational Time . 215 Antonio Vassallo, General Covariance, Diffeomorphism Invariance, and Background Independence in 5 Dimensions . 237 Ioan Muntean, A Metaphysics from String Dualities: Pluralism, Fundamentalism, Modality . 259 Adam Caulton, Is Mereology Empirical? Composition for Fermions . 293 Andreas Hüttemann, Physicalism and the Part-Whole Relation . 323 Jessica Wilson, Metaphysical Emergence: Weak and Strong . 345 Mauro Dorato and Michael Esfeld, The Metaphysics of Laws: Dispositionalism vs . Primitivism . 403 Marek Kuś, Classical and Quantum Sources of Randomness . 425 Jeremy Butterfield and Nazim Bouatta, Renormalization for Philosophers . 437 INTRODUCTION The present collection assembles new work in the flourishing field of the metaphysics of physics, running the full gamut from the philosophical con- sideration of the foundations of contemporary physics to a scientifical- ly informed analysis of traditional metaphysical concerns . Our desire to understand the innermost foldings of the world we inhabit has naturally brought physics and philosophy in close contact over the millennia; in fact, both disciplines have emerged out of the same systematic attempts to satiate this human zeal . Despite occasional dissonance and miscom- munication, the nexus between the two fields was mutually beneficial for the most part, and forged the foundation of modern science in the first scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and was instrumental in initiating the second scientific revolution during the late 19th and early 20th centuries . The resulting unprecedented success of physics in predictive accuracy, explanatory abundance, and range of technological applications has led to a more asymmetric relation between physics and philosophy: as the former shines in its well-deserved acclaim as the kingpin of science, the latter struggles to remain relevant as foundational and philosophical questions are increasingly seen as arcane, inscrutable, and unnecessary . Lest the reader mistakes us to condone philosophy’s supposed plight, we affirm that instead of waning in significance, foundational and philosoph- ical work has acquired new urgency in the light of fundamental physics’ continued struggle to even just formulate a complete quantum theory of gravity, let alone a comprehensive and unified foundation for all of con- temporary physics . This volume is concerned with specifically metaphysical issues that connect to physics . But even if the state of philosophy is altogether not that precarious, the prospects of metaphysics are routinely considered down- right daunting and its standing has only very recently started to recover from the logical empiricists’ onslaught almost a century ago . Its status and even its possibility have been the subject of protracted debates for long – in fact, long before the heyday of logical empiricism . Although we In: Tomasz Bigaj and Christian Wüthrich (eds ),. Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol . 104), pp . 7-24 . Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi | Brill, 2015 . 8 Tomasz Bigaj and Christian Wüthrich share the staunchly scientific spirit of the logical empiricists, we believe that the rehabilitation of metaphysics is long overdue and offer the follow- ing collection as evidence that naturalism and metaphysics can productive- ly interact with one another . 1. Metaphysics and Its Subject Matter So what, precisely, is metaphysics, and what possible intimate relations with cutting-edge scientific theories can it have? In a nutshell, metaphysics is the study of the fundamental structure of reality . Let us try to be more specific . A discipline can be identified by its unique subject matter and by its specific methodology . Regarding the for- mer, the subject matter of any field of inquiry is usually assumed to consist of a set of objects – the domain – and a set of distinguished properties and relations among these objects . Using Kit Fine’s terminology (Fine 2013) we may say that elements of the subject matter for a given discipline can occur in it either objectually, or predicatively . One characteristic trait of metaphysics is that every object can in principle be an element of its do- main of inquiry; another that it is customary to differentiate metaphysics from other branches of philosophy by excluding from its subject matter only the epistemic relation between the object of knowledge and the per- ceiving subject . This general trait is characteristic of physics too, with the additional restriction that the domain of physical inquiry is limited to material, spatiotemporal objects . Generally, metaphysics does not obey this restriction, as metaphysical considerations can, and often do, reach out into the realm of non-physical entities (abstracta, possibilia, values, etc ). However, it has to be admitted that there is a substantial overlap between the objectual parts of the subject matters for both physics and metaphysics . The difference in the subject matter between the two disciplines be- comes more conspicuous when we turn to the predicative part . While physics deals with fairly broad concepts, such as the notion of material objects, elementary particles, fields and interactions, metaphysics centers its analyses around even broader categories of objects, properties, identity and the like . However, it would not be correct to explicate the generality of metaphysical concepts simply in terms of the breadth of their scope . For instance, the concept of identity seems to be more universal than the concept of a (mereological) part, and yet the scope of the latter clearly includes the entire former category (as the numerical identity of objects x and y obviously implies that x is an (improper) part of y) . In light of this observation Kit Fine (ibid ). proposes to spell out the requisite notion of generality in terms of invariance . Since the relation of identity is invariant Introduction 9 under all permutations, while in the case of parthood a much narrower set of rearrangements of objects leave this relation unchanged, identity is less sensitive to the difference in descriptive character of objects than parthood, and therefore is considered more universal . With respect to its generality, metaphysics can be located between even more general – and topic-neutral – logic and decidedly less general science, including phys- ics . It goes without saying that there are no clear cut-offs on the scale of diminishing generality that could precisely separate these fields of inquiry, and therefore some logical and scientific questions can, on this criterion, be plausibly categorized as borderline
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