Space, Time and Causality by Richard Swinburne HARDCOVER LIKE NEW DJ

Description: SYNTHESE LIBRARY VOLUME 157 Space, Time and Causality Ed. by Richard Swinburne D. REIDEL PUBLISHING CO. 1983, HARDCOVER, DJ, 1ST EDITION, 205 PAGES. CONDITION: LIKE NEW. UNMARKED. The Royal Institute of Philosophy has been sponsoring conferences in alter nate years since 1969. These have from the start been intended to be of interest to persons who are not philosophers by profession. They have mainly focused on interdisciplinary areas such as the philosophies of psychology, education and the social sciences. The volumes arising from these conferences have included discussions between philosophers and distinguished practitioners of other disciplines relevant to the chosen topic. Beginning with the 1979 conference on 'Law, Morality and Rights' and the 1981 conference on 'Space, Time and Causality' these volumes are now constituted as a series. It is hoped that this series will contribute to advancing philosophical understanding at the frontiers of philosophy and areas of interest to non-philosophers. It is hoped that it will do so by writing which reduces technicalities as much as the subject-matter permits. In this way the series is intended to demonstrate that philosophy can be clear and worthwhile in itself and at the same time relevant to the interests of lay people. Three Steps Towards Absolutism J. L. Mackie Quite a number of philosophers of science have argued, in recent years, for at least some kind of absolutism about space or time or space-time; but most philosophers who do not specialize in this area seem to take a relativist view, and indeed a fairly extreme form of relativism, to be simply obvious, or to be established beyond the need for controversy. This paper is addressed primarily to such general philosophers, and its purpose is at least to disturb their complacency Reply to Mackie JON DORLING I believe that God1 is an extreme positivist, and presently I shall prove it. I also believe that we should try to emulate His system of beliefs. It follows that we should go in for extreme positivist critiques of existing theories in physics, and that this will yield a real prospect of improving them. But it also follows that we should not adopt an anthropocentric form2 of positivism. We need not, then, have positivistic doubts about the reality of the past, of physical objects, or of the microworld. I also happen to believe that the final correct theory of the universe will be almost unbelievably simple when axiomatized in an extreme positivist form. Absoluteness and Conspiracy Elie Zahar I find myself uncomfortably holding a position which is halfway between Mackie’s and Dorling’s. I am in full sympathy with Mackie’s view that absolutism cannot be ruled out on general verificationist grounds. Anyway, I thought — rather naively — that operationalism and strict verificationism were long dead. The universal quantifiers, which most respectable theories involve, constitute to my mind an insuperable obstacle to verificationism; unless of course it is assumed that the domain of discourse of such theories in finite, or at least discrete; an assumption which is unverifiable. As for operationalism, I took it for granted that the attempts to reduce all theoretical concepts to empirically decidable ones had failed; unless one weakens the operationalist requirement by admitting entities which are indirectly detectable; but then all concepts occurring in an empirically testable theory can be regarded as being ‘observational’ in this wider sense of the word. Prospects for a Causal Theory of Space-Time Lawrence Sklar What could possibly constitute a more essential, a more ineliminable, component of our conceptual framework than that ordering of phenomena which places them in space and time? The spatiality and temporality of things is, we feel, the very condition of their existing at all and having other, less primordial, features. A world devoid of color, smell or taste we could, perhaps, imagine. Similarly a world stripped of what we take to be essential theoretical properties also seems conceivable to us. We could imagine a world without electric charge, without the atomic constitution of matter, perhaps without matter at all. But a world not in time? A world not spatial? Except to some Platonists, I suppose, such a world seems devoid of real being altogether. Verificationism and Theories of Space-Time Richard Swinburne Professor Sklar’s paper brings out very clearly the difficulties for theories which attempt to reduce spatio-temporal relations either to a subset of privileged such relations or to something apparently very different. I find myself in very general agreement with almost everything which he writes. But feeling that he raises problems rather than solves them, I would like to attempt something more ambitious. Both the problems which he raises, of the proper limits to verificationism and to property-identification, inevitably hang over all discussion of space and time and are raised by other papers at this conference. Space precludes my considering both problems, and so I shall confine myself to considering the general issue of verificationism. I shall consider how far verificationism is supported by plausible philosophical arguments, and then argue that the kind of verificationism supported by such arguments gives no support to a Robbian programme. I apologize for the fact that I shall take some time over very general philosophical discussion before I apply my results to space-time talk. My excuse is that scientific talk about space and time has been influenced by verificationist presuppositions for the past century, perhaps more than any other scientific talk; and it is important to clear up the extent of their philosophical justification. Temporal and Causal Asymmetry Richard A. Healey There is a sense in which the causal relation is associated with the temporal direction earlier to later rather than the reverse. There is also a sense in which irreversible natural processes define a unique temporal direction. Just what these senses are needs to be clarified. But pending such clarification it seems clear that one can raise the question whether there is any relation between these two directions (the “direction of causation” and the “arrow of time”), and if so, what it is. This paper attempts to clarify, sharpen and return a provisional answer to this question. The philosophical aim which lies behind the investigation (but sometimes becomes more explicit) is to approach an improved understanding of the place of causation in physics, in the world, and in our thought. To introduce the relevance of our question to this aim, consider two opposing approaches to causation. Temporal and Causal Asymmetry W. H. Newton-Smith Healey has sought to improve our understanding of causation through a critical evaluation of two rival approaches, that of the physicalist and that of the conceptualist, with particular reference to the question of the direction of causation. The physicalist, as characterized by Healey, looks to our best physical theories to see what, if anything, in the physical world corresponds to causation. If nothing does he concludes that causal talk is illegitimate (Healey, p. 79). For Healey’s conceptualist no discovery in physics could have such exciting implication for the question of the status of causal talk. The conceptualist’s starting point is rather a hypothesis in philosophical anthropology to the effect that our causal concepts had their origin in the primitive human experience of producing changes in objects. That, I would have thought, is uncontentious. The more interesting claim is that while we have modified our primitive ancestor’s concept of causality, it retains to this day such a close connection with human agency that “causes are potential means by which humans could, at least ‘in principle’, bring about their effects” (Healey, p. 79). This anthropocentric aspect of causality means that “the direction of causal asymmetry is indexical with respect to our causal powers” (Healey, p. 98). How the Measurement Problem is an Artifact of the Mathematics Nancy Cartwright One of the most troubling assumptions of quantum mechanics is the projection postulate. This is the postulate which causes many to believe that there is a special role for consciousness in nature. The projection postulate describes what happens not in any circumstances but in those special circumstances in which an observation is made; and what is supposed to happen when an observation is made is very different from what happens in other interactions. When an observation is made, a ‘reduction of the wave packet’ occurs which does not occur otherwise. Measurement, Unitarity, and Laws Jeremy Butterfield In the first section of this paper, I first describe the measurement problem as a background to discussing Cartwright’s approach to it. This discussion prompts an examination of her general views on theoretical laws, theoretical entities and explanation, as expounded in her recent papers (1980, 1980a, 1980b, 1980c). So in the second section, I report and then discuss these views. Nonlocality and Peaceful Coexistence Michael Redhead The object of the present paper is to investigate the putative tension between the requirements of causality and special relativity (SR) on the one hand and the quantum-mechanical (QM) description of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment on the other. A preliminary formulation of the situation is that the EPR phenomenon involves an instantaneous propagation of a physical effect between two spatially separated systems which contradicts the requirements of SR, and moreover would lead to backward causation in appropriately moving reference frames. We will try to unravel this state of affairs in two stages. First we shall ask in what sense, if any, the transmission of a physical effect is involved in the EPR type of experiment and secondly whether SR definitively rules out such a possibility. Quantum Logic and Ensembles Peter Gibbins Probability, as it appears in quantum mechanics, is a measure on the non- boolean lattice of propositions known as quantum logic. It is therefore no surprise that quantum probability is non-classical and that attempting to impose on quantum probability a classical ensemble interpretation leads to paradox. One such paradox is provided by the ignorance interpretation of mixtures, another by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought-experiment. I shall argue, in reply to Dr. Redhead, that a quantum logical ensemble (QLE) interpretation of quantum mechanics resolves these paradoxes in a natural way and that in the case of the EPR paradox one need not invoke superluminal causal connections to account for the non-locality. This paper therefore has somewhat narrower scope than Dr. Redhead’s for I shall have no need to examine tachyonic mechanisms to explain the EPR correlations.

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