I've also considered publishing to a philosophy journal on them, but I think I would need help from people in the field in order to know that I've cited all the right people and not said anything embarassingly stupid.
heh, one day I hope to be qualified to offer such comments. In any case, I think it can only be a good thing for physicists and philosophers to talk to each other more, and cross-publishing might be a good way of doing this (although I'd be more wary about philosophers publishing in physics journals).
I think I would disagree here, depending on what you mean by "in modern physics". If I'm going to describe how a car moves on the freeway, regardless of how much modern physics I know, I'm still going to give Newtonian explanations...Newtonian physics ... nevertheless useful concepts."
Right, I guess I just don't buy that "just because we teach and talk like newtonians means we really accept newtonian explanations." Because those explanations refer to concepts/entities that are not found in a formal, rigorous description of modern physics I don't think that those explanations should be found in a formal, rigorous description either. Newtonian equations, however, could easily be found given an appropriately idealized scenario, I think. In other words, the hard part stays while the soft part goes (as I think was partly your point).
As for the theory/fact distinction: it might not be quite the same thing as the soft/hard distinction (and both are probably pretty fuzzy distinctions when you get right down to it. if you go all the way down to quine both distinctions would actually not be real distinctions at all), although I think they are at least pretty similar, as you say. In any case, hopefully you do end up writing a comment distinguishing the two :).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 06:34 pm (UTC)heh, one day I hope to be qualified to offer such comments. In any case, I think it can only be a good thing for physicists and philosophers to talk to each other more, and cross-publishing might be a good way of doing this (although I'd be more wary about philosophers publishing in physics journals).
I think I would disagree here, depending on what you mean by "in modern physics". If I'm going to describe how a car moves on the freeway, regardless of how much modern physics I know, I'm still going to give Newtonian explanations...Newtonian physics ... nevertheless useful concepts."
Right, I guess I just don't buy that "just because we teach and talk like newtonians means we really accept newtonian explanations." Because those explanations refer to concepts/entities that are not found in a formal, rigorous description of modern physics I don't think that those explanations should be found in a formal, rigorous description either. Newtonian equations, however, could easily be found given an appropriately idealized scenario, I think. In other words, the hard part stays while the soft part goes (as I think was partly your point).
As for the theory/fact distinction: it might not be quite the same thing as the soft/hard distinction (and both are probably pretty fuzzy distinctions when you get right down to it. if you go all the way down to quine both distinctions would actually not be real distinctions at all), although I think they are at least pretty similar, as you say. In any case, hopefully you do end up writing a comment distinguishing the two :).