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Pierre-Normand

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In the context of effective field theories, the autonomy at issue is the autonomy of a large-scale, low-energy, theory (such as QED) relative to a sma...
April 04, 2017 at 03:05
No. It's not fine. I was merely reinforcing Mariner's point, which you ignored.
April 03, 2017 at 16:39
Indeed. We can also observe that Islamic states kill people who simply are deemed to be enemy of the state, regardless of religious motive, and also t...
April 03, 2017 at 16:31
I wonder if other users experienced this. When I select some portion of a message that I want to reply to, there appears a floating button labelled "Q...
April 03, 2017 at 16:25
I remember either Timothy Williamson or Scott Soames (or maybe both) making this exact same methodological recommendation. David Wiggins also sometime...
April 02, 2017 at 02:22
I quite agree with you on both counts, regarding the complementary strength/weaknesses of both traditions.
April 02, 2017 at 02:10
Your example then would be an example of a counterfactual conditional statement used to specify what it is for individuals of a specific kind (e.g. hu...
April 02, 2017 at 02:01
I don't follow. What are those two means?
April 02, 2017 at 00:32
What I said about broad theories, as opposed to individual laws, is also true of wide areas of inquiry. The explanation of the properties of acids and...
April 02, 2017 at 00:16
No, it doesn't entail that. The autonomy of whole theories almost always is merely partial, since broad theories encompass both emergent laws and redu...
April 02, 2017 at 00:06
Interesting! Indeed, it seems to be equivalent. 1) Actual(P) entails Nec(P) (=def modal collapse) 2) Actual(~P) entails Nec(~P) 3) ~Nec(~P) entails ~A...
April 01, 2017 at 23:23
Hmmm... I would hope that that an ideal community of investigators would end up not merely producing a final theory that encompasses all the early the...
April 01, 2017 at 23:06
This is a bit tricky because the truth of this sentence seems to entail the position Micheal Ayers labeled actualism (in his brilliant The Refutation ...
April 01, 2017 at 22:56
Indeed. This is also how I understood the problem.
April 01, 2017 at 22:48
I know what it's called. Giving it a name doesn't address the issue.
April 01, 2017 at 22:44
OK, but I think the OP meant discuss a semantical problem that is raised specifically by subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent -- that...
April 01, 2017 at 22:40
I wonder how Unitary Quantum Mechanics deals with the semantics of counterfactual conditional statements that have counterlegal antecedents. (e.g. If ...
April 01, 2017 at 22:34
Indeed. If there ends up there being two "copies" of you, you never find yourself in a situation where you are both of them.
April 01, 2017 at 22:29
It seems to me that some authors use the phrase "counterfactual conditional" to mean the same as "subjunctive conditional", but it also occurs frequen...
April 01, 2017 at 22:26
There are many ways to translate statements about occurrences governed by real laws (either deterministic or probabilistic) conceived to be governing ...
April 01, 2017 at 22:19
Yes. The deflationary theorist then would seem to be faced with the same problem that the correspondence theorist was faced with, as andrew4handel exp...
April 01, 2017 at 19:55
I think the main point of the deflationary theories of truth is negative. It is to show that meaningful uses of the "...is true" predicate in natural ...
April 01, 2017 at 19:27
Well, lets say that it is post-critical in the Kantian sense, and not reliant on anything as crude as naive realism. Many deflationary theorists may o...
April 01, 2017 at 19:10
I don't think you meant to say "makes the sentence white", but rather "makes the sentence true". Indeed, the deflationary theorists also have to disch...
April 01, 2017 at 18:56
This is very similar the the suggestion that I made though it appeals to a conception of laws that rests on a metaphysics of events and Humean causati...
April 01, 2017 at 18:45
The deflationary truth theorists make claims that sound very much like the things correspondence theorists say, but they chip away some of the metaphy...
April 01, 2017 at 18:41
Maybe one the main problems afflicting the correspondence theory of truth is the way in which it seems to presuppose a form of uncritical metaphysical...
April 01, 2017 at 17:40
I did not suggest that they were approximations, though some undoubtedly are. For a law not to apply universally need not entail that there must exist...
March 31, 2017 at 10:13
Maybe you and I are, but Weinberg isn't. He takes his observation about the apparent convergence of the arrows of explanation produced by science to f...
March 31, 2017 at 08:59
Fair enough. But you can also fail to converge. Weinberg believes it to be an empirical fact (regarding the history of science) that actual arrows of ...
March 31, 2017 at 08:38
If the explanation were complete (which I may assume it to be, for the sake of the argument), then the term that I would use is "reductive explanation...
March 31, 2017 at 08:25
They must converge towards a single point, according to Weinberg. They must converge towards the "final theory", somewhere underneath both the Standar...
March 31, 2017 at 07:50
Why not indeed! But the pluralist/emergentist admits readily of them. Remember Ernst Mayr on "analysis"? For one merely to be admitting of the existen...
March 31, 2017 at 07:46
For sure. It's Weinberg who would object to this, not me. He can't admit of his "arrows of explanation" pointing "sideways" to autonomous laws rather ...
March 31, 2017 at 07:36
I never said anything about the autonomy of "frameworks". I argued that some theories are non-reducible when they explain some emergent phenomena and ...
March 31, 2017 at 07:24
That's true, for sure. But, in addition to this, many of the laws of chemistry are valid only for some specific classes of bounded chemical systems (a...
March 31, 2017 at 07:10
Yes, and so? QED may have a wide range of applications and a large domain of validity. This has nothing to do with the question whether or not it migh...
March 31, 2017 at 07:03
I don't recall using the phrase "high level structures" (though that might aptly characterize the objects and properties directly being governed by th...
March 31, 2017 at 06:14
This binary question is much too crude. There are specific laws of chemistry that are autonomous with respect to the laws that govern simple molecular...
March 31, 2017 at 05:37
Yes, there is.
March 31, 2017 at 04:41
Yes, sure. The photon's being massless is a requirement for QED being renormalisable. (I didn't remember that, by the way. I Googled it). What's your ...
March 31, 2017 at 04:40
I can't say. Your first sentence is too vague. Maybe you could phrase it more precisely and explain the relevance of your question to what we've been ...
March 31, 2017 at 03:33
It's rather misleading to call it an alternative to QED when QED can be logically derived from it. It would be better to say that it's a more determin...
March 31, 2017 at 03:30
By the way, I just found out that Karen Crowther recently published a book: Effective Spacetime: Understanding Emergence in Effective Field Theory and...
March 31, 2017 at 02:27
I'm not sure what the difficulty is. There are parameters of the electroweak theory (EWT, for short) that can only be determined empirically through p...
March 31, 2017 at 02:12
No, QED is not part of the relevant equivalence class. You are still badly misconstruing what I said. Are you really incapable of reading a whole sent...
March 31, 2017 at 01:27
The set of theories that I mentioned are singled out as being part of the relevant equivalence class. It was meant as a definition of this equivalence...
March 31, 2017 at 00:58
He was plumper on the earlier coins in the series and thinner on the later ones. There were no automated coin press machines at the time; and Gautama ...
March 30, 2017 at 21:49
You can read Feyman's popular "QED" book, if you're curious; or Google the Wikipedia page, maybe.
March 30, 2017 at 11:21
No but it's not a paraphrase of what I wrote. It ignores the point about underdetermination.
March 30, 2017 at 11:19