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A Primer on Determinism
The title of this work is to be taken seriously: it is a small book for teaching students to read the language of determinism. Some prior knowledge of college-level mathematics and physics is presupposed, but otherwise the book is suitable for use in an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in the philosophy of science. While writing I had in mind primarily a philosophical audience, but I hope that students and colleagues from the sciences will also find the treatment of scientific issues of interest. Though modest in not trying to reach beyond an introductory level of analysis, the work is decidedly immodest in trying to change a number of misimpressions that pervade the philosophical literature. For example, when told that classical physics is not the place to look for clean and unproblematic examples of determinism, most philosophers react with a mixture of disbelief and incomprehension. The misconcep tions on which that reaction is based can and must be changed."
273 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 1986
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December 5, 2021
A good quick way to sum up this book somewhat ironically, is to say that its objective is to demystify us of our lack of mystification about the concept of determinism.
Earman takes on Laplace's demon and far from seeing its failure merely in airy fairy realms of spirituality, and personal belief and morality, he sees that the notion of a pure deterministic system is somewhat limited even in its supposed heartland of Newtonians clockwork universe of absolute space and time.
The details get quite technical, but to give a quick example, a similar kind of difficulty also arises in special relativity for determinism thanks to the conceptual presence of tachyons. We can try to rule out such entities by fiat, but to find good conceptual grounds to rule them out is more difficult. They tend to be an implied feature of the theory. And so there is this constant interplay in the sciences between our desire to affirm determinism, at the same time as affirming the contingency of empirical reality. If we affirm one too much, we tend to lose the other. If we make determinism true merely, ad hoc in our system, by fiat, we do so by losing touch with an empirical reality with features always beyond our control. If we try to embrace any and all empirical contingencies we happen to come across, we have little to no chance of formulating controllable deterministic laws of anything.
Similar issues arise with general relativity, leaving us in a position where determinism can neither be posited as an ontological reality fixing things for eternity in all possible worlds and times, as perhaps Laplace's demon would have liked, yet nor can determinism be abandoned completely for we rely on appeal to its style of regularities to sharpen our physical insight into the nature of the physical world.
This book is a good attempt to add something relevant and new to the literature on this topic of determinism and the relation between this concept and current physical theory, without succumbing to a misplaced reification between a positivism or conventionalism of scientific wisdom on one side, and a blur of groundless hopeful metaphysical speculation on the other. It seems there is no clear way to make our choice on these issues, but we must ride that thin line between the two to avoid closing off our insight about and understanding of physical reality into some model of our own mental imagining.
Earman takes on Laplace's demon and far from seeing its failure merely in airy fairy realms of spirituality, and personal belief and morality, he sees that the notion of a pure deterministic system is somewhat limited even in its supposed heartland of Newtonians clockwork universe of absolute space and time.
The details get quite technical, but to give a quick example, a similar kind of difficulty also arises in special relativity for determinism thanks to the conceptual presence of tachyons. We can try to rule out such entities by fiat, but to find good conceptual grounds to rule them out is more difficult. They tend to be an implied feature of the theory. And so there is this constant interplay in the sciences between our desire to affirm determinism, at the same time as affirming the contingency of empirical reality. If we affirm one too much, we tend to lose the other. If we make determinism true merely, ad hoc in our system, by fiat, we do so by losing touch with an empirical reality with features always beyond our control. If we try to embrace any and all empirical contingencies we happen to come across, we have little to no chance of formulating controllable deterministic laws of anything.
Similar issues arise with general relativity, leaving us in a position where determinism can neither be posited as an ontological reality fixing things for eternity in all possible worlds and times, as perhaps Laplace's demon would have liked, yet nor can determinism be abandoned completely for we rely on appeal to its style of regularities to sharpen our physical insight into the nature of the physical world.
This book is a good attempt to add something relevant and new to the literature on this topic of determinism and the relation between this concept and current physical theory, without succumbing to a misplaced reification between a positivism or conventionalism of scientific wisdom on one side, and a blur of groundless hopeful metaphysical speculation on the other. It seems there is no clear way to make our choice on these issues, but we must ride that thin line between the two to avoid closing off our insight about and understanding of physical reality into some model of our own mental imagining.
August 7, 2011
Meilleur ouvrage sur le sujet.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews