Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 1: Symmetry and Geometry

AGPhil 1.2: Vortrag

Montag, 21. März 2022, 11:30–12:00, AGPhil-H14

Arguments from scientific practice in the debate about the physical equivalence of symmetry-related models — •Joanna Luc — Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

In the recent philosophical literature, several counterexamples to the interpretative principle that symmetry-related models are physically equivalent have been suggested (Belot 2013, Belot 2018, Fletcher 2020). Arguments based on these counterexamples can be understood as arguments from scientific practice of roughly the following form: because in scientific practice such-and-such symmetry-related models are treated as representing distinct physical situations, these models indeed represent distinct physical situations. I will argue that if we are exclusively interested in models understood as representing entire possible worlds (not their subsystems), arguments from scientific practice should involve some additional assumptions to guarantee that they are relevant for models understood in this way. However, none of the examples presented in the literature satisfy all these additional assumptions, which leads to the conclusion that arguments from scientific practice based on these examples do not undermine the interpretative principle that different symmetry-related models represent the same possible world. An important ingredient of my argumentation is the distinction between implicit and explicit modes of representing in physics; symmetry-related models understood as representing subsystems are in some contexts physically inequivalent only because they represent implicitly some physical object (associated with a reference frame).