AN INFERENTIAL ACCOUNT ON THEORETICAL CONCEPTS IN PHYSICS.
| Autor | Anta, Javier |
| Cargo | Ensayo |
1 . Introduction
The problem of how the concepts that emerge within scientific theories and practices acquire their meaning has been central to the whole history of the philosophy of science. Both in logical positivism, wherein concepts were mere syntactic theoretically-independent nodes in a formal-deductive web, and in the historicist philosophies of Kuhn and Feyerabend, for whom the content of concepts depended on their place within theories, the analysis of how concepts acquire empirical-theoretical meaning and come to refer to their respective phenomena has been a merely subsidiary issue to the logical reconstruction of theories or to the narrative of the historical evolution of scientific disciplines, respectively. (1) This lack of attention changed substantially within the last decades, when the role of theoretical (2) concepts in various scientific practices (e.g. measurement processes, phenomena modeling, predictive procedures, and so on) acquired enormous philosophical relevance.
One of the main trends in the current philosophical assessment of scientific concepts is to explain their theoretical (as well as empirical) meaning and referential effectiveness from historical and cognitive factors, emphasizing their role in the development and use of scientific models in actual practices. (3) In this manifold of pragmatic views, Peacocke (1992) defined scientific concepts as the cognitive acceptance of a set of inferential rules. Years later, Wilson (2006) also developed a complex perspective that treats theoretical concepts in the natural sciences as inferential connections that vary dynamically depending on their application context.
In this paper I will depart from Peacocke's and Wilson's proposals to develop an inferential conception of theoretical concepts in the context of the physical sciences, which would mainly affirm that these should be understood by the way in which their content contributes to the inferential obtaining of relevant information about reality from scientific representations. Our main thesis will be that the semantic content or meaning of theoretical physical concepts can be differentiated between two main ways in which they contribute to an inference being 'valid', namely: their empirical meaning, connected to experimental measurement practices, and their theoretical significance, linked to the semantic coherence of concepts in a representation. Therefore, central to this proposal will be the (epistemic-pragmatic rather than logical) (4) notion of 'inferential validity', which we can initially define as the fact that the information that has been inferred depends semantically and syntactically on the content of the conceptual resources of a representation. Once our inferential proposal has been exposed, I will use it to clarify how the content of the concept (or better said 'concepts') of entropy works within thermal physics, delimiting in what sense it could be empirically meaningful and/or thermophysically significant and how these modes of meaning allow us to obtain relevant information about thermophysical phenomena.
The plan for this paper is the following. In the next section we will explore two of the most relevant current positions on theoretical concepts, mainly Chang's neo-operationalism (2004) and Nersessian's historicist cognitivism (2008). In section 3 we will develop our inferential account on the meaning of theoretical concepts in physics, distinguishing between empirical meaningfulness and theoretical significance as different kinds of contributions to the validity of inferences within actual practices. Additionally, section 4 will be devoted to understanding in which sense the empirical meaningfulness and the theoretical significance of concepts can provide causal and representational reference-fixing mechanisms. Finally, we will apply this inferential framework to the particular case of entropy concepts as a case study.
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Current Views on Theoretical Concepts: Neo-Operationalism and Historical-Cognitivism
Systematic philosophical assessment of theoretical concepts, not in general but in the particular field of the natural sciences, extends throughout the twentieth century to the present day. There is no doubt that one of the most historical and currently relevant perspectives is what is known as 'operationalism'. Operationalism broadly defends that the meaning of scientific concepts might be completely fixed by a specific set of measurement operations (although the nature and characterization of these operations is debatable) by which the content of this concept can be completely defined. This view was originally developed by the physicist Percy Bridgman (1927) during a period ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s, and was quickly assimilated by the Vienna Circle and its heirs.
In this context, Carnap argued that the notion of 'concept' should be rejected in favor of that of 'term' due to the psychological connotations of the former. Within this philosophical framework, the content of theoretical concepts (which are inserted within primitive statements or hypotheses of a given theory) depends on their being formally connected within the conceptual network of that theory with its empirical infrastructure made up of empirically measurable statements. That is, according to the proto-operationalist Carnapian proposal, the meaning of a theoretical concept is syntactically and deductively derived from a set of observable statements formulable from measurement operations, without the semantic content of such statements playing any relevant role in such process. The concepts are nothing but nodes in the deductive network that conforms the structure of a particular scientific theory (Kindi and Arabatzis 2008. p. 348).
One of the main defenses of operationalism in the current philosophy of science was carried out by Hasok Chang (2004) in his celebrated Inventing Temperature, where he traces the genesis of the concept of temperature through the historical evolution of the thermometric discipline. However, his neo-operationalist proposal radically departs from previous logical-empirical versions by understanding operations not as structural sets of idealized observational statements but as real measurement practices. For Chang, the significant physical meaning of 'KELVIN TEMPERATURE' (5) (developed by Lord Kelvin in the late 1840s) depends intrinsically on the consistency of thermometric techniques and operations employed by the scientific community in a particular practical context. In particular, the semantic content of this thermophysical concept is based on the theoretical-technical possibility of using absolute temperature scales, a la Kelvin or Rankine, in actual measurement procedures.
For what we can call 'reductionist operationalism', the meaning of scientific concepts would be fixed independently of the theory in which they are inserted, precisely because the different measurement operations are not intrinsically associated with certain theories. All that is required is that the theoretical systems 'touch the observational ground' (6) (Chang 2019). In this sense, reductionist operationalism would defend that the content of concepts is operationally fixed, and therefore theoretically independent or constant across different theoretical contexts: the meaning of the concept of absolute temperature is the same both within the theory of heat (whether historically rejected or not) and in phenomenological thermodynamics. This applies not only to those concepts that are directly connected with the operational basis, as is the case with 'KELVIN TEMPERATURE', but also to those that are connected by other concepts as is the case with 'CLASIUS ENTROPY', defined by ratios of infinitesimal variations of heat quantities 'Q' and values of absolute temperature quantities 'T' of a system.
The theoretical independence of concepts underlying operationalism has straightforward consequences for the problem of concept identification. For example, 'KELVIN TEMPERATURE' and 'SPECIFIC TEMPERATURE' would constitute two separate empirical concepts if each is semantically connected with distinct sets of thermometric operations. However, for those concepts whose content is not directly observable, such as entropy in our case, the situation is more complex. According to operationalism the only element that contributes to meaning is the connection of a concept with the operational basis, two terms such as 'CLASIUS ENTROPY' and 'BOLTZMANN ENTROPY' form a single concept since both depend on the same set of thermometric operations (those linked to 'KELVIN TEMPERATURE'), despite the fact that the two former concepts are theoretically embedded within different theories such as thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, respectively. Another major disadvantage is the inability to distinguish between concepts as such and the mental access of scientific agents to the content of these concepts, both of which are made possible by operational definitions. Chang (2019) discusses the problematic nature of understanding operations (Bridgman (1927) himself does not make it clear how the notion of 'operation' is to be understood in detail) not only as measurement activities but also as mental processes. However, extending the notion of 'operation' to the mental domain does not illuminate in any way the conditions under which an agent possesses a given scientific concept.
Another of the most relevant current philosophical perspectives is Nersessian's cognitive-historical proposal (2008). This author retrieves part of the approach from the historicist tradition of Kuhn and Feyerabend, emphasizing the analysis of real historical cases and rejecting decontextualized evaluations of the conduct of science, adding certain features of the methodology of cognitive sciences to study such as the epistemic dynamics of scientific agents in concrete scientific practices. From this historical-cognitive method...
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