Moderate structural realism about space-time

Moderate structural realism about space-time

Michael Esfeld & Vincent Lam University of Lausanne, Department of Philosophy & Centre romand for logic, history and philosophy of science CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland [email protected], [email protected] (Draft, 8 June 2006, forthcoming in Synthese) Abstract This paper sets out a moderate version of metaphysical structural realism that stands in contrast to both the epistemic s...

Naive Realism about Operators

A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a “naive realism about operators.” By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to the all too casual talk about “measuring operators” that occurs when the subject is quantum mechanics. Without a specification of what should be meant by “mea...

Realism about Behavior

Behavior analysis emphasizes the study of overt animal (human and nonhuman) behavior as a subject matter in its own right. This paper provides a metaphysical foundation for such an emphasis via an elucidation of a thesis that I generically call “realism about behavior,” where by “realism” I mean an assertion of mindindependent existence. The elucidation takes the form of a conceptual framework ...

Some Realism About Empiricism

Group Structural Realism

We present a precise form of structural realism, called group structural realism, which identifies ‘structure’ in quantum theory with symmetry groups. However, working out the details of this view actually illuminates a major problem for structural realism; namely, a structure can itself have structure. This paper argues that, once a precise characterization of structure is given, the ‘metaphys...