Notes Toward a Post-Positivistic Interpretation of Science, Part II

Abstract

Our discussion will begin with a consideration of three examples. These cases are meant to bring out the fact that, in at least some actual physical reasoning, a distinction is made between the way or ways in which entities can or cannot exist and the way or ways in which, for the sake of dealing with certain problems, it is possible and convenient to treat those entities, even though, on purely physical grounds, we know that they could not really be that way. For the sake of convenience (and not to introduce a pair of technical terms) we shall refer to the concepts so distinguished as, respectively, “existence concepts” (or “existence terms”) and “idealization concepts” (or “idealization terms”). The precise characteristics of these concepts will be brought out in the examples to be discussed. It must be remembered that for some purposes it might be necessary to point out differences between the cases classified together here, and, furthermore, that not all concepts employed in physics fit appropriately into either of the two classes distinguished here. The present section will focus primarily on idealization concepts, discussion of existence concepts being postponed until the next section.