Lam and Esfeld have argued that, within Bohmian mechanics, the wave function can be interpreted as a physical structure instantiated by the fundamental particles posited by the theory. Further, to characterize the nature of this structure, they appeal to the framework of Ontic Structural Realism, thereby proposing a structuralist interpretation of Bohmian mechanics. However, I shall point out that OSR denotes a family of distinct views, each of which maintains a different account about the relation between structures and objects, and (...) entails a different kind of ontology. Thus, in this paper I will show how to articulate the structuralist approach to Bohmian Mechanics accordingly to the different standard versions of OSR, and I will evaluate these alternatives. Moreover, I will propose a novel and _sui generis_ kind of structuralist interpretation of Bohmian Mechanics, based on the framework of metaphysical coherentism. (shrink)

How distinct is European philosophy of science? The first step is to characterize what is or might be considered as ‘European philosophy of science’. The second is to analyse philosophy of the social sciences as a relevant case in the European contribution to philosophy of science. ‘European perspective’ requires some clarification, which can be done from two main angles: the historical approach and the thematic view. Thus, there are several structural and dynamic things to be considered in European philosophy of (...) science and compare with other conceptions: the topics discussed; the contents proposed; and the style of thought used. The case of philosophy of the social sciences is relevant for the historical approach and for the thematic view. Historically, the Erklären–Verstehen methodological controversy arose in this continent, where the main authors and most of the influential approaches are located. Thematically, we can consider the contributions made by these European approaches... (shrink)

On the occasion of the recent experimental detection of a Higgs-type particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the paper reviews philosophical aspects of the Higgs mechanism as the presently preferred account of the generation of particle masses in the Standard Model of elementary particle physics and its most discussed extensions. The paper serves a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it offers an introduction to the Higgs mechanism and its most interesting philosophical aspects to readers not familiar with (...) it; on the other hand, it clarifies widespread misunderstandings related to the role of gauge symmetries and their breaking in it. (shrink)

This paper argues that ontic structural realism (OSR) faces a dilemma: either it remains on the general level of realism with respect to the structure of a given theory, but then it is, like epistemic structural realism, only a partial realism; or it is a complete realism, but then it has to answer the question how the structure of a given theory is implemented, instantiated or realized and thus has to argue for a particular interpretation of the theory in question. (...) This claim is illustrated by examining how OSR fares with respect to the three main candidates for an ontology of quantum mechanics, namely many worlds-type interpretations, collapse-type interpretations and hidden variable-type interpretations. The result is that OSR as such is not sufficient to answer the question of what the world is like if quantum mechanics is correct. (shrink)

In recent literature, it has become clear that quantum physics does not refute Humeanism: Lewis’s thesis of Humean supervenience can be literally true even in the light of quantum entanglement. This point has so far been made with respect to Bohm’s quantum theory. Against this background, this paper seeks to achieve the following four results: to generalize the option of quantum Humeanism from Bohmian mechanics to primitive ontology theories in general; to show that this option applies also to classical mechanics; (...) to establish that it requires a commitment to matter as primitive stuff, but no commitment to natural properties ; to point out that by removing the commitment to properties, the stock metaphysical objections against Humeanism from quidditism and humility no longer apply. In that way, quantum physics strengthens Humeanism instead of refuting it. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward an alternative interpretation of time-reversal symmetry in philosophy of physics: Humean time-reversal symmetry. According to it, time-reversal symmetry is understood as a heuristic, epistemic virtue of the best system, not as a property of the Humean mosaic. One of the consequences of this view is that one of the main arguments against a primitive direction of time is rendered harmless, which paves the way for primitivism about the direction of time.

Quantum Theory and Humeanism have long been thought to be incompatible due to the irreducibility of the correlations involved in entangled states. In this paper, we reconstruct the tension between Humeanism and entanglement via the concept of causal structure, and provide a philosophical introduction to the ER=EPR conjecture. With these tools, we then show how the concept of causal structure and the ER=EPR conjecture allow us to resolve the conflict between Humeanism and entanglement.

In The Context of Laws of Nature Structural Humeanism vs. Classical Humeanism -/- In the context of the laws of nature, philosophers of science have developed some views in order to adopt an attitude towards recurring events in nature. In this respect, it has been discussed whether there is any driving force underlying the regular behaviours and movements we encounter in nature, and two approaches have emerged as a result of the discussion: A view that there are certain driving forces (...) or causal relations in the ground, and an opposing view that claims that there are no causal relations in the ground, but there are regularities in nature. Views such as the latter are generally described as the Humean view. Such views are also called regularity theories. Throughout this article, the statements referred to as regularity are characterised as the Humean view. Since the article will be centred on the Humean view, views such as the first view, such as dispositional essentialism or structural realism, are not the concern of this article. The article favours the Structural Humean approach over the classical Humean approach. The classical Humean approach is centred on the views of David Lewis and is concerned with distinguishing between laws of nature seen as accidental generalisations and regularities. While it tries to make such a distinction by constructing nature through a mosaic, the Structural Humean approach is an approach that develops Lewis’s claims and tries to shape nature with the concept of structure rather than mosaic. Thus, it is seen as an approach that provides more information than the Classical Humean approach in terms of creating a philosophical infrastructure for explaining nature in terms of modern physics. Through Psillos, Structural Humeanism tried to place the concept of natural pattern into the structure in order to gain metaphysical solidity and tried to bring the Structural Humean approach closer to the Structural Realism camp. Thus, the classically epistemologically important Humean approach has made a significant progress in positioning it on the realist wing. As a result of all these studies, the Structural Humean approach has been defended as a philosophical approach that offers useful arguments for modern physics compared to the Classical Humean approach. -/- Keywords: Humeanism, Regularity, Laws of Nature, Best System Account, Structural Humeanism, Natural Patterns. (shrink)

The paper spells out five different accounts of the relationship between objects and relations three of which are versions of ontic structural realism. We argue that the distinction between objects and properties, including relations, is merely a conceptual one by contrast to an ontological one: properties, including relations, are modes, that is the concrete, particular ways in which objects exist. We then set out moderate OSR as the view according to which irreducible relations are central ways in which the fundamental (...) physical objects exist. Physical structures thus consist in objects for whom it is essential that they are related in certain ways. There hence are objects, but they do not possess an intrinsic identity. This view can also admit intrinsic properties as ways in which objects exist provided that these do not amount to identity conditions for the objects. Finally, we indicate how this view can take objective modality into account. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it is finally time to move beyond the Nagelian framework and to break new ground in thinking about epistemic reduction in biology. I will do so, not by simply repeating all the old objections that have been raised against Ernest Nagel’s classical model of theory reduction. Rather, I grant that a proponent of Nagel’s approach can handle several of these problems but that, nevertheless, Nagel’s general way of thinking about epistemic reduction in terms of (...) theories and their logical relations is entirely inadequate with respect to what is going on in actual biological research practice. (shrink)

This article aims to clarify how aspects of current chemical understanding relate to some important contemporary problems of philosophy. The first section points out that the long-running philosophical debates concerning how properties stay together in substances have neglected the important topic of structure-determining closure. The second part describes several chemically-important types of closure and the third part shows how such closures ground the properties of chemical substances. The fourth section introduces current discussions of structural realism (SR) and contextual emergence: the (...) final sections reconsider the coherence of the properties of substances and concludes that recognition that structures qualify as determinants of specific outcomes—as ‘causes’ as that designation is used in Standard English—clarifies how properties stay together in chemical entities, and by analogy, how characteristics cohere in ordinary items. (shrink)

In his 1927 Analysis of Matter and elsewhere, Russell argued that we can successfully infer the structure of the external world from that of our explanatory schemes. While nothing guarantees that the intrinsic qualities of experiences are shared by their objects, he held that the relations tying together those relata perforce mirror relations that actually obtain (these being expressible in the formal idiom of the Principia Mathematica). This claim was subsequently criticized by the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman as true but (...) trivial, insofar as from a closed body of observations (or “Ramsey sentence”) one can always generate other equally-satisfactory networks of relations, provided they respect the original set’s cardinality. Since any model thus generated will be empirically adequate, “[t]he defence is therefore driven back from the fairly safe fictitious-real classification to the much less tenable ‘trivial’ and ‘important’” (Newman 1928). Given the definitional rigour afforded by the initial appeal to isomorphism (via one-to-one correspondences in extension), the received assessment, shared by Russell himself, is that retreating to a pragmatic adjudication would betoken a fatal blow. However, I suggest that reliance on “importance” can be avoided if we incorporate an impersonal criterion of diachronic precedence. When collecting observations, an ordinality emerges alongside the cardinality which gives that underived structure an irrevocable epistemological privilege. Hence, I argue that, all other things being equal, any construct parasitic on an antecedent theory ought to be regarded as inferior/dispensable, since it was generated by an algorithm lacking the world-involving pedigree of its host structure. (shrink)

In der modernen Physik spielen Symmetrien eine herausragende Rolle zur Identifikation und Klassifizierung der fundamentalen Theorien und Entitäten. Symmetrien dienen der Darstellung invarianter Strukturen, das geeignete mathematische Werkzeug hierfür ist die Gruppentheorie. Eine Struktur lässt sich als eine Menge von Relationen verstehen, die einer Menge von Objekten aufgeprägt sind. Strukturell charakterisierte Objekte sind daher wesentlich über ihre relationalen Eigenschaften charakterisiert. Sieht man die theoretischen Entitäten wissenschaftlicher Theorien vornehmlich in dieser strukturellen Weise an, vertritt man eine moderate Variante eines wissenschaftlichen Realismus, (...) die als Strukturenrealismus bekannt ist. Im Umfeld dieser drei Konzepte – Symmetrien, Strukturen, Realismus – bewegt sich der folgende Aufsatz. (shrink)

Structural Realism (SR) is typically rated as a moderate realist doctrine about the ultimate entities of nature described by fundamental physics. Whether it must be extended to the higher-level special sciences is not so clear. In this short paper I argue that there is no need to ‘structuralize’ the special sciences. By mounting concrete examples I show that structural descriptions and structural laws certainly play a role in the special sciences, but that they don’t play any exclusive role nor that (...) they give us any reason to believe that all that there is on the various levels is structure. I fortify my points by arguing that structures are global entities (in order for SR not to collapse into a bundle ontology) and that the assumption of higher-level structures as genuinely global or holistic entities is even more arcane. (shrink)

According to causal realism, causation is a fundamental feature of the world, consisting in the fact that the properties that there are in the world, including notably the fundamental physical ones, are dispositions or powers to produce certain effects. The paper presents arguments for this view from the metaphysics of properties and the philosophy of physics, pointing out how this view leads to a coherent ontology for both physics as well as biology and the special sciences in general.

The paper has three parts. In the first part ExtOSR, an extended version of Ontic Structural Realism, will be introduced. ExtOSR considers structural properties as ontological primitives, where structural properties are understood as comprising both relational and structurally derived intrinsic properties or structure invariants. It is argued that ExtOSR is best suited to accommodate gauge symmetry invariants and zero value properties. In the second part, ExtOSR will be given a Humean shape by considering structures as categorical and global. It will (...) be laid out how such structures serve to reconstruct non-essential structural kinds and laws. In the third part Humean structural realism will be defended against the threat of quidditism. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a metaphysics of science in the sense of a naturalized metaphysics. It considers in the first place the interplay of physics and metaphysics in Newtonian mechanics, then goes into the issues for the metaphysics of time that relativity physics raises, shows that what one considers as the referent of quantum theory depends on metaphysical considerations and finally explains how the stance that one takes with respect to objective modality and laws of nature shapes the options that are (...) available for an ontology of quantum physics. In that way, this chapter seeks to make a case for a natural philosophy that treats physics and metaphysics as inseparable in the enquiry into the constitution of the world, there being neither a neo-positivist way of deducing metaphysics from the formalisms of physical theories, nor a neo-rationalist realm of investigation for metaphysics that is independent of physics. (shrink)