Dear Cambridge Philosophers of Science, This message is a reminder that tomorrow (Wednesday), 9 March, Nic Teh, now of Notre Dame, will be talking about "Unifying Theories: Some Lessons from the Cartwright-Smith Exchange." The talk will be at HPS downstairs at 1 as usual. The abstract is below. Sincerely, Brian Pitts
Abstract: I examine the Cartwright-Smith debate over the disunity of classical physics as a test case for understanding the relationship between a formal strategy called Schematic Unification (SU) and “horizontal” Theoretical Unification (TU). I then argue that (i) Smith’s charge of incoherence against Cartwright is unsuccessful; and (ii) the abstract unification proposed by Smith (which turns out to be a form of SU) falls short of securing TU for classical physics. On the other hand, Cartwright's deflationary attitude towards SU seems to neglect some of its genuine virtues: as we shall see, it can play an important role in theory/model construction and in formulating contrastive explanations. J. Brian Pitts Senior Research Associate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
