{"title":"Non-empirical physics from a historical perspective: New pathways in history and philosophy of physics","authors":"Pablo Ruiz de Olano , Richard Dawid , C.D. McCoy","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.01.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.01.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this Special Issue, we explore the rise of non-empirical physics from a historical perspective. This exercise is meant, furthermore, as an attempt to open new pathways in contemporary history and philosophy of physics. We use this introduction to provide the theoretical background necessary to flesh out this program and to appreciate the manner in which the different articles in the collection substantiate it. To do this, we proceed in the following manner. First, we briefly lay out the development of contemporary philosophy of physics, and the manner in which the range of topics covered in the specialized literature expanded over the past few decades. After that, we chronicle the advent of non-empirical physics during the second half of the twentieth century, and we introduce the philosophical debates triggered by this development. These debates, as we show, did introduce new topics of discussion in the literature. However, these discussions did not arise as a deliberate attempt to add new ideas to the philosophy of physics repertoire. Instead, they emerged as a natural consequence of the historical development of physics itself. Taking this observation as our starting point, we argue that engaging with the controversies around non-empirical physics, and with the historical circumstances behind their appearance, provides a more fruitful, more historically grounded approach towards updating the canon of philosophy of physics. We then single out some areas in which further historical work is particularly promising, and we highlight the contributions made by each one of our authors. We conclude by inviting others to join the philosophical program sketched here, and to add their own insights to the ones contained in this Special Issue.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"110 ","pages":"Pages 13-16"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143394976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resisting Newton in provincial France, 1750s–1770s: Opposition from the margins to the Parisian academic community","authors":"Marco Storni","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.004","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.004","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the eighteenth century, the requirements for participation in scientific life were progressively narrowed, leading to a gradual closure of the community of the learned. This shift was influenced by the dissemination of Newton's natural philosophy across Europe, which catalysed the rejection of previously dominant principles and methods, while heralding the adoption of a new approach, based on mathematics and experimentalism. This paper examines various forms of resistance to the emergence of a community of Newtonian savants in post-1750 France, focusing on institutions and authors located at its margins. First, I analyse the relationship between provincial and central academies through the case study of the Académie des Belles-Lettres de Caen. Here, the persistent opposition to Newton was partly due to cultural conservatism but was also a form of resistance to the centralisation and concentration of expertise, and the resulting homogenisation of practices, promoted by the Paris Academy. Secondly, I examine the opposition to Newton by some authors working outside the academic milieu, who contributed to the “provincialisation” of knowledge by addressing a provincial public in their writings. Their aim was not only to engage in a dialogue with the savants of the authoritative institutions, which was almost impossible at the time, but also to appear as polemicists on the public stage, attracting a readership thirsty for scientific perspectives alternative to those considered mainstream.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 21-30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142865995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Through the convex Looking Glass: A Helmholtzian lesson for the connection between dynamics and chronogeometry in spacetime theories","authors":"Pablo Acuña","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.11.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.11.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Over the last two decades, the rise of the dynamicist view in the philosophy of spacetime theories has motivated a discussion about the way in which chronogeometric structure and dynamics are connected. Geometricists defend that chronogeometry determines and explains dynamics, whereas dynamicists state that it is the other way around. Both parties assume that the arrow of explanation at issue involves a claim of fundamentality and priority of one of the elements over the other. I challenge this assumption, and I propose a third way to understand the connection. Drawing a lesson from Herman von Helmholtz's and David Hilbert's views on the foundations of geometry, I argue that in spacetime theories chronogeometry and dynamics are inextricably interconnected counterparts, so claims of fundamental explanation and priority, regardless of the direction of the alleged arrow, are misconceptions. The link between chronogeometry and dynamics in spacetime theories is properly understood in terms of a bidirectional arrow, not in terms of a unidirectional arrow of fundamental explanation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 31-46"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142899679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rewriting the Quantum “Revolution”","authors":"Diana Taschetto","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.006","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.006","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper is a critical analysis of the structure of the quantum revolution. I consider the factual question of how, historically and theoretically, the classical gave way to the quantum, and I argue for an answer that shows, contra Thomas Kuhn’s influential philosophy of science, that it is the logic, and not the sociology and psychology, of research that correctly explains the classical-to-the-quantum paradigm shift. My approach is based not on archival studies but on a careful reading, in their original historical context, of Max Planck’s and Albert Einstein’s well-known papers; the burden of my argument, which at points will be outspoken, consists, then, in identifying and removing the impediments that prevent us from reading these papers in themselves. For this task I critically consider both the main, and mutually antagonistic, accounts of the origin of the quantum theory currently available in the literature—namely, the orthodox story, according to which Planck inaugurated the quantum theory in 1900, and that proposed by Thomas Kuhn in Black-Body Theory and Quantum Discontinuity—and I show that both of them are essentially incorrect. Both overlook the scientific status of the probabilistic kinetic theory of heat as of 1900, of which both Planck and Einstein were acutely aware. The orthodox story will be refuted by showing that Planck did not postulate energy discreteness to derive his black-body radiation law in 1900; and Kuhn, though he argued, as I do here, against the orthodoxy, did so on different grounds, and his own alternative is refuted by showing that Planck’s black-body radiation formula did not trigger a Kuhnian “crisis” in classical physics. This conceptual housekeeping will serve its purpose by removing the obstacles that make it impossible to analyze Planck’s and Einstein’s papers in themselves; once this is done, my conclusions follow.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 72-88"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142903932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"","authors":"Edna Suárez-Díaz","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 132-133"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143143658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intellectual inflation: one way for scientific research to degenerate","authors":"Javier Anta","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.01.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.01.003","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper aims to analyze a specific way in which a scientific programme or area can, in Lakatosian terms, degenerate: namely, through a developmental process of intellectual inflation. Adopting a pluralist approach to the notion of scientific progress, we propose that the historical development of a particular scientific area can be analyzed as being intellectually inflationary during a bounded period of time if it has considerably increased its productive output (thus demonstrating productive progressive) while the overall semantic or epistemic value of those products have not improved in a significant fashion (thus lacking progress in a semantic or epistemic sense). Then, we apply this concept to thoroughly assess whether there have been some intellectually inflationary patterns in the development of (i) information-theoretical evolutionary biology in 1961–2023, and (ii) ensemblist non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in 1938–2023. And finally, we argue that tracking and analyzing intellectually inflationary patterns in the history of sciences might contribute to vindicate a non-productivist picture of current scientific research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 134-145"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143043014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tracing the world through grasp and synthesis","authors":"Helene Scott-Fordsmand","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 106-108"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143142567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Believing in organisms: Kant's non-mechanistic philosophy of nature","authors":"Juan Carlos González","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.010","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.010","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, I defend a non-mechanistic interpretation of Kant's philosophy of nature. My interpretation contradicts the robust tradition of reading Kant as a mechanist about nature – or as someone who endorses the view that we can know the internally purposive causality characteristic of organisms has no place in nature. By attending closely to Kant's remarks about the possibility of internal purposiveness in nature and to key premises from Kant's arguments in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, we shall see that it is not only plausible, but preferable, to believe that internally purposive things (i.e., organisms) exist in nature. Making room for such a belief leaves Kant with a philosophy of nature that simultaneously aligns with and surpasses the philosophies of nature offered up by his Early Modern predecessors.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 109-119"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142928174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Measurement, decomposition and level-switching in historical science: Geochronology and the ontology of scientific methods","authors":"George Borg","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.013","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Philosophers of the historical sciences have focused to a significant extent on the problem of epistemic access facing these sciences: how do historical scientists overcome the relative scarcity of data about the past, compared to the present? Solving this problem usually requires solving another one, which I call the ‘problem of ontic access:’ how do historical scientists get access to entities and processes with properties that are potentially informative about the past? The case of geochronology illustrates one solution to this problem: historical scientists can get access to entities and processes with properties that are potentially informative about the past by exploiting the metaphysical structure of their domain. Geochronology experienced a spectacular explosion of its research boundaries in the 20th century. I explain this productivity by analyzing the ontology implicit in geochronological techniques. The productivity of isotope geochronology was based on (a) mereological decomposition in order to (b) exploit differences of properties obtaining between the parts and the whole, and (c) an exceptional complementarity between mass spectrometry and the lower-level properties, allowing application to a wide range of geological contexts. The technologically mediated ability of the scientists to exploit the metaphysical structure of their domain was crucial to their success.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 123-131"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142972949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Temperature changes: The conceptual realignment of a quantity term","authors":"Jon Dickinson","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.012","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.12.012","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recently, John McCaskey (2020) has proposed that the arrival of Daniel Fahrenheit's thermometers precipitated the eighteenth-century conceptual change of temperature. I examine the usage of the <em>temperature</em> term in the <em>Philosophical Transactions</em> for this period, leading from the creation of the Fahrenheit thermometer up to the first employment of numerical <em>temperature</em> within the journal, in which temperature is constituted by a numerical value. I identify four strands linking thermometry and meteorology to temperature's conceptual change: the weather data network of James Jurin; the dissemination and acclaim for Fahrenheit thermometers; a resurgence in the usage of <em>temperature</em> in meteorological writing; and both exploratory usage and a broadening of the term's extent as it realigned to thermometry. The realignment of <em>temperature</em> in this period cultivated a conception of temperature whereby it could be constituted by the numerical readings of a thermometer, a sense which had not existed previously. This historical survey demonstrates that a refinement of Joseph LaPorte's (2004) precisification account for conceptual change is required for it to accommodate temperature. I suggest two modifications: a greater potential flexibility in the term's extent, permitting the abandonment of previous senses, and the possibility for tacit conceptual changes that may proceed without stipulation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"109 ","pages":"Pages 47-57"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142899674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}