> On Aug 12, 2015, at 7:15 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: > > It's quite possible that I'm wrong-headed about it, but Is this inversion by > the idea of constructors a difference that makes a difference? What is it > beyond rephrasing? > > Peirce found plenty of modalism in the ordinary language or thinking of > physics. If something is conditionally necessary or fated in the sense of a > physical law, how does it help to express it _more_ modally for any reason > besides perhaps increased clarity? I mean, how does it result in new > predictions or help somebody do physics? If you have a bunch of physical > structures constraining possibilities in the same way, that's called a law. > Peirce saw generals, laws, etc., as governing individuals, not vice versa to > any significant extent. Why shouldn't Peirce have thought of the idea of > constructors as an effort to rephrase modal realism in approximately > nominalist terms? > (Sorry for the delay answering - I know a lot of discussions go back and forth multiple times a day. I’ll probably be a few days between posts simply due to work commitments.)
It does seem to be a pretty big difference. I recognize by that comment you’re asking about empirical differences. In that sense it’s attempting to explain the same phenomena of course. The analogy might be to the three formulations of mechanics (Newton, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian) and asking what practical difference there is between the three. Yet there are metaphysical differences that I think do make a difference in terms of what’s fundamental. Certainly once we moved to the beginnings of quantum mechanics there were practical differences as formulating QM in Newtonian form was quite difficult (although one can interpret virtual particles in Feynman diagrams as a kind of Newtonian-like formulation of QM) With regards to Constructor Theory I don’t know enough about it to argue minutiae. However it seems that you look at the structure of the system (the generals) and what physical ways the system can be configured. You then calculate laws from this. As I said one can do this in thermodynamics already and some textbooks will actually due this calculation. So in terms of differences it seems to me that there are big calculative differences. Rather than having a mysterious ontological law we instead calculate in terms of physical differences. This to me seems exactly the type of difference we see between say the positivists forms of verification (either the 19th century form or the Vienna Circle form) and the type favored by Peirce with his Maxim (as opposed to the more expansive form we find in James). While Peirce saw the Maxim as flushing away a lot of nonsense metaphysics he also thought it would enable us to distinguish certain kinds of metaphysics. The types of practical differences he saw was precisely the sorts of practical measuring of phenomena a scientist might do. In this case we have a difference in how we make measurements and calculations. So there may be some valid criticisms of the theory, and perhaps even in terms of the problem of practical differences. Yet I don’t think the Maxim discounts this as meaningful. (Although perhaps some positivists might, although I suspect a Carnapian might appeal to language systems to show it is still intelligible)
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