Philosophy of Physics for Beginners
Malcolm Forster, Tsinghua University, Fall 2010.
There will be lectures and discussions on the following 5 topics, roughly one topic per week. Many of these
readings can be downloaded right now by using the following link:
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/xythoswfs/webui/_xy-37927234_1-t_AhIIG8Wr
1.
An Introduction to the History of the Copernican Revolution. It’s not possible to deeply understand
the philosophy of physics or the philosophy of science without knowing something about the
development of planetary astronomy (predicting the positions of celestial bodies in the night sky) from
Ptolemy to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and finally Newton. There are many good introductions, but I
recommend:
Cohen, I. Bernard (1985): The Birth of a New Physics, Revised and Updated Edition. W. W. Norton &
Company, New York.
2.
Whewell-Mill Debate about the Nature of Scientific Induction in Planetary Astronomy: This
debate is central to the traditional debate in epistemology between rationalists and empiricists, and
highly relevant to the Kuhnian debate about the nature of scientific revolutions in physics.
Forster, Malcolm R. (1988), “Unification, Explanation, and the Composition of Causes in Newtonian
Mechanics.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 19: 55 - 101.
Forster, Malcolm R (2010): “The Debate between Whewell and Mill on the Nature of Scientific
Induction”, in Stephan Hartmann (ed.), The Handbook of the History of Logic, Volume 10:
Inductive Logic. Elsevier Science, pp. 91-113.
3.
Reichenbach’s Principle of Common Cause. Whewell’s theory of scientific induction involves the
idea that the best explanation of why independent measurements of some theoretically postulated entity
agree is that the entity actually exists. Salmon has discussed this idea with respect to the acceptance of
the atomic theory of matter after many independent measurements of Avogadro’s number agreed.
Arntzenius, Frank (1993): “The Common Cause Principle.” PSA 1992 Volume 2: 227-237. East
Lansing, Michigan: Philosophy of Science Association.
Salmon, Wesley (1984): Chapter 8 “Theoretical Explanation” in Scientific Explanation and the Causal
Structure of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 206-238.
4.
The Bell Argument. Reichenbach’s Principle of Common Cause is challenged by Bell’s famous
argument against the existence of hidden variables (hidden causes) in quantum mechanics. There is no
need to know anything about quantum physics in order to understand this fascinating and puzzling
argument.
Mermin, David N. (1985) “Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the quantum theory.”
Physics Today, April 1985, pp.38-47.
Mermin, David N. (1990) “Quantum Mysteries Revisited.” American Journal of Physics 58: 731-4.
van Fraassen, Bas (1982). “The Charybdis of Realism: Epistemological Implications of Bell’s
Inequality.” Synthese 52, pp.25-38.
5.
Philosophy of Space and Time for Beginner’s. The Bell argument proves that there is some sense in
which quantum physical phenomena involve some kind of non-local action-at-a-distance across space
and time. This challenges the Einstein’s theory of space and time, which appears to imply that there can
be no such action-at-a-distance. It therefore motivates us to take a closer look at the philosophy of space
and time, from Newton to Einstein, which is beautifully explained by John Norton is our last reading.
Norton, John D. (1992): “Philosophy of Space and Time”, Chapter 5 in Salmon, Merrilee H. et al
(1992), Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Prentice Hall, pp. 179-231.