Process Realism in Physics

How Experiment and History Necessitate a Process Ontology

William Penn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9783110782370
• eBook ISBN: 9783110782677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Science should tell us what the world is like. However, realist interpretations of physics face many problems, chief among them the pessimistic meta induction. This book seeks to develop a realist position based on process ontology that avoids the traditional problems of realism. Primarily, the core claim is that in order for a scientific model to be minimally empirically adequate, that model must describe real experimental processes and dynamics. Any additional inferences from processes to things, substances or objects are not warranted, and so these inferences are shown to represent the locus of the problems of realism. The book then examines the history of physics to show that the progress of physical research is one of successive eliminations of thing interpretations of models in favor of more explanatory and experimentally verified process interpretations. This culminates in collections of models that cannot coherently allow for thing interpretations, but still successfully describe processes.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Continuity and Process Realism
• Chapter 2 Processes Underlie Processes
• Chapter 3 The Candle Flame: A Process-Realist Analysis
• Chapter 4 Perrin’s Argument: A Robustness Argument for Processes, Not Things
• Chapter 5 Models of the Nucleus: Incompatible Things, Compatible Processes
• Summary and Prospectus
• Index