Dear all, Please join us for the CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar
Wednesday 6th November 1-2:30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2. Sam Fletcher (UC Irvine) will give a talk entitled "The topology of intertheoretic reduction". The abstract is below. Best wishes, Christopher Abstract: The standard accounts of reductive limiting relations between theories tend to focus on the limits of laws instead of limits of models, the solutions of those laws. But accounting for how the models of one (older/less fundamental) theory approximate or are similar to those of another (newer/more fundamental) theory is crucial for explaining the (properly circumscribed) empirical success of the former. In many cases, one can make the notion of "model similarity" precise by appeal to mathematical tools from topology. The particular topology one picks for a theory's models precisely encodes the similarly of particular features. One can concretely apply this approach, for example, to better understand the relationship between Newtonian gravitation and General Relativity -- Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge Personal Website: www.chrisclarke.eu <http://www.chrisclarke.eu/index.html> Project Website: www.humannature.hps.cam.ac.uk -- Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge Personal Website: www.chrisclarke.eu <http://www.chrisclarke.eu/index.html> Project Website: www.humannature.hps.cam.ac.uk
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