Status Updates From Dynamics of Reason (Kant Le...

The analysis of Darwinian biology and evolution is also deeply flawed and weak. Why is he bringing Kant up in such a discussion? His Critique of judgment offers no basis for evolutionary thinking. And why Pierce and pragmatism? How about social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer the people who actually took Darwins ideas to a complete ontological system?

As we can do this, why not do it? Why commit ourselves to such a ever more ludicrous ontology of physical structure when we could simply bring into question that itty bitty metric infiinitesimally extending out from every event?

We can always vary the curvature rather than admit some unseen force, or we can postulate some unseen thing to explain a bit of variation in curvature that is otherwise unexplained. Does this seem like a strong ontological structure? I am not saying we should abandon it, but we should hold it in a place like Husserl's epoche, monitor its results without fully committing to its ontology.

The structure may have no ontological status at all, as general covariance may be such that any deviations find an explanation that can be fitted into the framework. What of dark matter, dark energy? All these extra ontological structures that emerge from taking general relativity's structure too seriously perhaps and can be arbitraily varied to undermine any discrepancies

But this theory, of course, is limited to spaces of constant curvature and is thus quite inapplicable to the radically new (space-time) structure employed in the general theory of relativity."

[Once again statements like this are dubious to my mind. he is claiming an ontological status for this structure which is under dispute due to general covariance, diffeomorphisms etc and due to quantum loop gravity possibility

He also neglects to mention the thermodynamics revolution story. This I believe should surely class as more fundamental conceptually and theoretically than the chemical revolution story. Boltzman, Maxwell's Demon, once again Barbours recent ideas, even Hawkings and mainstream cosmology is largely inspired by the thermodynamics aspects in their extensions of general relativity.

Also he overestimates Einsteins completion of the relative motion dilemma. Einsteins view does not complete the story as we see from the likes of Julian Barbour one has to go further to genuinely complete the Machian revolution. And the whole general covariance issue is glossed over considerably. Add the variable speed of light view Einstein considered also as I would like to see this directly addressed.

Disappointing assessment of quantum theory, neglecting to mention quantum gravity, and the quantum loop gravity approach where space and time are emergent. Perhaps this was just an emerging idea when he wrote this.. However, I think it raises more serious problems for his whole interpretation and its precedence, for if space-time is emergent the whole tradition he is privileging is in fact secondary.

Major assumptions social and otherwise have to be made as to what is accepted as this internally constituted realism, and these are precisely what are under debate when we are looking to make changes in our perspective, and so cannot be taken as given without a holistic appeal to some presumed "consensus". It is not enough to defeat relativism and holism

However, just as in the case of Kant's original conception, we do retain an element of"internal" or what Kant called "empirical realism." For, once a given constitutive framework is already in place, there is a perfectly precise sense in which we can then speak of a "matching" or "correspondence" between a theory formulated within that framework and the empirical or phenomenal world.

{Still Holism]

" In particular, although I have argued for an essential element of convergence in the historical evolution of successive constitutive frameworks, this is explicitly not convergence to an entirely independent "reality" (however conceived) but rather convergence within the evolving sequence of constitutive frameworks itself.

[This amounts to little better than holism then unfortunately]

It is important to note that what I have here offered in response to Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is a defense of scientific rationality, not a defense of "scientific realism." For me, the main problem posed by post-Kantian scientific developments is precisely a challenge to the idea of universal (trans-historical) scientific rationality - to the Enlightenment ideal of a fixed rationality,

when, in particular, we are still very far from an adequate micro-theory of the structure of matter. And, where such rigid bodies must "still be called upon as independent elements;' it is clear, is precisely in the foundations of the general theory.

Einstein concedes that" [s] ub specie aeterni Poincare, in my opinion is correct," for "practically rigid bodies" are in fact unsuitable to play the role of "irreducible elements in the conceptual framework of physics." Nevertheless, Einstein suggests, they must provisionally "still be called upon as independent elements in the present stage of theoretical physics.

There are considerable conceptual pitfalls here. however. For, as is now well known. the general theory of relativity does not fully realize the
relativistic" ambitions by which Einstein was originally motivated; For
discussion of this issue see, e.g., Friedman (1983, especially sections V.4 and V.5).

In the case of both of his fundamental coordinating principles, then, Einstein directly appealed to already accepted empirical facts and to already established conceptual resources and problems. He thereby put practitioners of the earlier physics in a position both to understand his introduction of a radically new coordination and, with a little good will, to appreciate it and accept it as a genuine alternative

Our problem is not to explain why it is rational to accept Einstein's new theory of gravitation as correct. This question can be settled in a relatively straightforward fashion once the radically new coordination effected by Einstein's principIe of equivalence is in place. Our problem is rather to explain how Einstein's new theory of gravitation becomes a rational or reasonable possibility in the first place

In these terms, therefore, the most fundamental problem raised by the
Kuhnian account of scientific revolutions (and, in particular, by the idea of incommensurability) is to explain how it can be communicatively rational to move to a new constitutive framework, based on a radically new set of coordinating principles, despite the fact that this new framework, from the old perspective, is not even empirically possible.

These trajectories now play the role that the (purely hypothetical) trajectories of bodies acted on by no forces at all (inertial trajectories) played in Newtonian physics, with the difference that they now define a variably curved rather than a flat inertial structure. In this way, gravitational force is directly incorporated into the geometry of space-time and thus into the constitutive framework of our theory.

On the contrary, the only way in which we can now empirically define an inertial structure in the first place is precisely in terms of the "freely falling" trajectories in a gravitational field.

Einstein used the very same empirical fact as the basis for a radically new constitutive framework. In particular, within this new space-time framework there is no longer an inertial structure (and thus, in Newtonian physics, a class of inertial reference frames) already pre-existing independently of gravity.

Whereas, in the context of the Newtonian theory of gravitation, the equality of gravitational and inertial mass, and the consequent independence of trajectories in a gravitational field from all properties of the attracted bodies, appeared as an interesting (albeit very important) additional fact subsisting against the background of an already established constitutive framework,...

Just as in the case of special relativity and the light principle, then, Einstein "elevated" an already accepted empirical fact to the status of a new fundamental coordinating principle..

The law of the constancy and source-independence of the velocity of light coordinates concrete physical phenomena with the Lorentzian (or infinitesimally Minkowskian) character of the new four dimensional space-time metric, and the law that freely falling "test particles" in a gravitational field follow four dimensional geodesic paths of this metric then completes the coordination.

In the case of the general theory of relativity, in particular, the required coordination is established by two fundamental Einsteinian principles: the light principle and the principle of equivalence...

..And the solution at which they both arrived is that there is a special class of non-empirical physical principles - variously called coordinating or constitutive principles by Reichenbach, conventions in the sense of Henri Poincare by Schlick whose function is precisely to establish and secure the required connection between abstract mathematical structures and concrete sensory experience.