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Science and Human Freedom pp 1–62Cite as

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Matter in Motion: The Scientific Image of the World

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Abstract

This chapter elaborates on what the ontological commitments of science are and what they are not. It focuses on the fundamental and universal theories of physics from Newtonian mechanics to today’s quantum physics. The chapter answers the following question: Which ontological commitments are minimally sufficient to understand our scientific knowledge? The purpose of this chapter is to work out the philosophical points that are necessary in order to grasp why science does not come into conflict with our freedom. It shows why the ontology of science is not rich enough for such a conflict to arise.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. Bell (2004, p. 175).

  2. 2.

    See also Maudlin (2019, pp. 49–50).

  3. 3.

    Cf. Hacking (1975) and Belot (2001).

  4. 4.

    See notably Ladyman (1998), French and Ladyman (2003), Esfeld (2014b), Esfeld and Lam (2008) and French (2014).

  5. 5.

    See Descartes, Principles of philosophy, in particular part 1, § 53.

  6. 6.

    See Leibniz, third letter to Newton-Clarke, § 5, in Leibniz (1890, pp. 363–364); English translation Leibniz (2000).

  7. 7.

    See Leibniz, third letter to Newton-Clarke, § 4, fourth letter, § 41, fifth letter, §§ 29, 47, 104, in Leibniz (1890, pp. 363, 376–377, 395–396, 400–402, 415).

  8. 8.

    Lazarovici (2018b) is right in laying stress on this issue.

  9. 9.

    See Barbour (2012) and Mercati (2018) for an overview.

  10. 10.

    See Barbour and Bertotti (1982), Barbour (2003) and Mercati (2018, part II).

  11. 11.

    For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Lange (2002, ch. 1).

  12. 12.

    Quoted from Laplace (1951, p. 4); original publication 1814.

  13. 13.

    See e.g. Popper (1950a, b) and Breuer (1995).

  14. 14.

    See Lazarovici and Reichert (2015) for a detailed presentation .

  15. 15.

    See Lazarovici (2018a) for details.

  16. 16.

    See Rovelli (1997) for such a view.

  17. 17.

    See again Lazarovici (2018a) for an elaboration on these arguments.

  18. 18.

    For an assessment of the philosophical consequences, see, over and above Lazarovici (2018a), also Hartenstein and Hubert (2019).

  19. 19.

    For an excellent exposition, see Maudlin (2012, chs. 4–5).

  20. 20.

    There is no reason to admit fundamentally source-free fields in electrodynamics, although for practical purposes, one calculates with external fields without considering their sources. As mentioned in the previous section, fields in classical electrodynamics are in the end not independent degrees of freedom. See again Deckert and Hartenstein (2016) as well as Hartenstein and Hubert (2019).

  21. 21.

    See Gomes et al. (2011), Gomes and Koslowski (2013), Mercati (2018, ch. 7). See furthermore Gryb and Thébault (2016, in particular pp. 692–697) for a philosophical discussion .

  22. 22.

    See Maudlin (1995) for a precise formulation of the measurement problem.

  23. 23.

    See Wallace (2008) for a general overview.

  24. 24.

    See Dürr et al. (2013). See Goldstein (2017) for an overview , Bricmont (2016) for a recent elaborate defense and Dürr and Teufel (2009) for a textbook presentation.

  25. 25.

    See also Loewer (1996).

  26. 26.

    See Dürr et al. (2013, ch. 2) for details.

  27. 27.

    See already Gisin (1984) for a forerunner.

  28. 28.

    See e.g. Cowan and Tumulka (2016).

  29. 29.

    See Maudlin (2011, p. 258 and 2019, pp. 113–115) for this objection.

  30. 30.

    See e.g. Maudlin (2010, pp. 135–138 and 2019, pp. 117–121) for this objection. See Esfeld (2014a) for a detailed assessment of these proposals.

  31. 31.

    See again Esfeld (2014a) for a detailed argument.

  32. 32.

    See Lazarovici et al. (2018).

  33. 33.

    See Bell (2004, notably chs. 2, 7, and 24). See Goldstein et al. (2011) for an excellent didactic overview and Maudlin (2011) for a discussion of the consequences of this theorem.

  34. 34.

    See Esfeld (2015).

  35. 35.

    Furthermore, see Chen (2019) for a proposal how to integrate thermodynamics and the past hypothesis in quantum physics.

  36. 36.

    See Dürr et al. (2013, chs. 2 and 5).

  37. 37.

    English translation in Howard (1985, pp. 187–188).

  38. 38.

    See Barrett (2014) and Esfeld and Gisin (2014).

  39. 39.

    See Dürr et al. (2018) for a detailed treatment. See furthermore Vassallo (2015), Vassallo and Ip (2016) and Koslowski (2017).

  40. 40.

    See Barrett (2014) for the measurement problem in quantum field theory.

  41. 41.

    See Esfeld and Deckert (2017, ch. 4) for the details how to do this. See also already Colin and Struyve (2007).

  42. 42.

    Cf. also the quotation from Feynman in Sect. 1.1.

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    Michael Esfeld

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Esfeld, M. (2020). Matter in Motion: The Scientific Image of the World. In: Science and Human Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37771-7_1

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