In 1907 Einstein had the insight that bodies in free fall do not “feel” their own weight. This has been formalized in what is called “the principle of equivalence.” The principle motivated a critical analysis of the Newtonian and special-relativistic concepts of inertia, and it was indispensable to Einstein’s development of his theory of gravitation. A great deal has been written about the principle. Nearly all of this work has focused on the content of the principle and whether it has (...) any content in Einsteinian gravitation, but more remains to be said about its methodological role in the development of the theory. I argue that the principle should be understood as a kind of foundational principle known as a criterion of identity. This work extends and substantiates a recent account of the notion of a criterion of identity by William Demopoulos. Demopoulos argues that the notion can be employed more widely than in the foundations of arithmetic and that we see this in the development of physical theories, in particular space–time theories. This new account forms the basis of a general framework for applying a number of mathematical theories and for distinguishing between applied mathematical theories that are and are not empirically constrained. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new framework supporting the claim that some elements in science play a constitutive function, with the aim of overcoming some limitations of Friedman's (2001) account. More precisely, I focus on what I consider to be the gradualism implicit in Friedman's interpretation of the constitutive a priori, that is, the fact that it seems to allow for degrees of 'constitutivity'. I tease out such gradualism by showing that the constitutive character Friedman aims to track can (...) be captured by three features - namely, quasi-axiomaticity (QA), generative potential (GP), and empirical shielding (ES) - which are exhibited to a maximal degree by the examples Friedman deploys, particularly in his analysis of Newtonian mechanics. I argue that not all varieties of 'constitutivity' can be captured by the kind of gradualism implicit in Friedman's view, although developing the gradualism itself might provide useful insights. To show this, I analyse the function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle (HWP) in population genetics in terms of its QA, GP, and ES. Whereas the HWP does not count as constitutive in classical philosophical interpretations (Sober 1984), nor does it within Friedman's framework, it does nonetheless perform a minimally constitutive function. By means of historical details and considerations on the prospects of replacing the HWP, I show that the HWP is minimally constitutive by being a counterfactual instantiation of a paradigmatically constitutive stability principle, where the latter might itself be regarded as an enabling condition for a variety of modelling practices across the sciences. (shrink)

Intuitively, the totality of physical reality—the Cosmos—has a beginning only if (i) all parts of the Cosmos agree on the direction of time (the Direction Condition) and (ii) there is a boundary to the past of all non-initial spacetime points such that there are no spacetime points to the past of the boundary (the Boundary Condition). Following a distinction previously introduced by J. Brian Pitts, the Boundary Condition can be conceived of in two distinct ways: either topologically, i.e., in terms (...) of a closed boundary, or metrically, i.e., in terms of the Cosmos having a finite past. This article proposes that the Boundary Condition should be posed disjunctively, modifies and improves upon the metrical conception of the Cosmos’s beginning in light of a series of surprising yet simple thought experiments, and suggests that the Direction and Boundary Conditions should be thought of as more fundamental to the concept of the Cosmos’s beginning than classical Big Bang cosmology. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.

The paper surveys the possibility of keeping a neo-Kantian approach in the face of Loop Quantum Gravity. Together with a preliminary analysis of Cassirer’s re-interpretation of Kantian philosophy that allowed him to harmonize the a priori cognitions with the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, it will focus on the distinction between constitutive and regulativea priori. In this way, the paper will suggest that despite Rovelli’s refutation of Kant’s interpretation of space and time, he seems, at least implicitly, to hold (...) to a couple of neo-Kantian assumptions: the usage of constitutivea priori principlessuch as granularity, indeterminism and partially relation, and the claim for functionalism as a rule in ordering the ‘appearances’. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing when (...) justification for using these abstract tools comes, in part or entirely, from knowledge which is not independent from them, thus leading to threats of circularity. Achieving coordination between some abstract conceptual tools and the concrete phenomena that they are supposed to represent is usually a complex process, which involves several epistemic components. Some of these components eventually provide stable conditions for applying those abstract representations to concrete phenomena. It is in this sense of providing certain conditions of applicability that different philosophical traditions, as well as some contemporary reappraisals, view these components as constitutive or a priori. In this work, I present a new gradualist, contextualist, and relational approach to understand these constitutive components of scientific inquiry. It is gradualist inasmuch as the degree to which some component is constitutive depends on three quantifiable features: quasi-axiomaticity, generative potential, and empirical shielding. Since the quantification of these three features impinges on the history and practice of using these components in a scientific context, my approach is a contextualist one. Finally, my approach is relational in a double sense: first, it identifies ordinal relationships among epistemic components with respect to their constitutive character; second, these relationships are relative to a scientific framework of inquiry. After introducing my account and a classic example of constitutively a priori principles, i.e., Friedman’s (2001) analysis of Newtonian mechanics, I turn to my own case studies to demonstrate the advantages of my approach. Firstly, I discuss Okasha’s (2018) view of endogenization as a pervasive theoretical strategy in evolutionary biology and suggest that the constitutive character of the core Darwinian principles progressively increases with endogenization. Secondly, I apply a conceptual distinction between two varieties or scopes of coordination – general coordination and coordination in measurement – to Ohm’s work on electrical conductivity. This distinction allows me to pinpoint to what extent components along different dimensions (e.g., instrumentation, measurement, theorising, etc.) were constitutive of the forms of coordination which Ohm relied on. Thirdly, I discuss the epistemic function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle in the history and practice of population genetics. I assess this principle in terms of my account and identify approximation and stability as two components that are highly constitutive, in that they contribute to justifying its use in population genetics. Finally, applying my account to these case studies enables me to identify at least three qualitatively different types of constitutive components: domain-specific theoretical principles, material components, and domain-independent assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In the light of my results, I draw some general conclusions on epistemic justification and scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The idea that a serious threat to scientific realism comes from unconceived alternatives has been proposed by van Fraassen, Sklar, Stanford and Wray among others. Peter Lipton's critique of this threat from underconsideration is examined briefly in terms of its logic and its applicability to the case of space-time and particle physics. The example of space-time and particle physics indicates a generic heuristic for quantitative sciences for constructing potentially serious cases of underdetermination, involving one-parameter family of rivals T_m that work (...) as a team rather than as a single rival against default theory T_0. In important examples this new parameter has a physical meaning and makes a crucial _conceptual_ difference, shrinking the symmetry group and in some case putting gauge freedom, formal indeterminism vs. determinism, the presence of the hole argument, etc., at risk. Methodologies akin to eliminative induction or tempered subjective Bayesianism are more demonstrably reliable than the custom of attending only to "our best theory": they can lead either to a serious rivalry or to improved arguments for the favorite theory. The example of General Relativity vs. massive spin 2 gravity, a recent topic in the physics literature, is discussed. Arguably the General Relativity and philosophy literatures have ignored the most serious rival to General Relativity. (shrink)