Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for understanding the world. "Physics avoidance" refers to the fact that we frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but difficult to justify. But simple techniques frequently rest upon complex foundations--a young magician learns how to execute a card-guessing trick without understanding how its progressive steps squeeze in on a proper answer. As we collectively improve our inferential skills in this gradually evolving manner, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex and unanticipated ways. Like our juvenile conjurer, we fail to recognize the true strategic rationales underlying our achievements and may turn instead to preposterous rationalizations for our policies. We have learned how to reach better conclusions in a more fruitful way, but we remain baffled by our own successes. At its best, philosophical reflection illuminates the natural developmental processes that generate these confusions and explicates their complexities. But current thinking within philosophy of science and language works to opposite effect by relying upon simplistic conceptions of "cause," "law of nature," "possibility," and "reference" that ignore the strategic complexities in which these concepts become entangled within real life usage. To avoid these distortions, better descriptive tools are required in philosophy. The nine new essays within this volume illustrate this need for finer discriminations through a range of revealing cases, of both historical and contemporary significance.
Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world.
By these means, the book attempts to reconnect analytic philosophy with the evolving practicalities within science from which many of its grander concerns originally sprang.
Forthcoming in Physics Avoidance ( an abridged version to appear in The Oxford Handbook in Philosophy of Physics , R. Batterman ( ed . ) ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , forthcoming ) . Zabell , Sandy ( 2016 ) .
See also physics avoidance of singularities via, 291–292, 405–406 cosmic time and, 194–197 double slit experiment, 467–468 entanglement, 466–467 foundational issues, 486–491 free will and, 466–467 hidden-variables theories, 195, 196, ...
... 498, 505, 521–2 Lévy, Paul 247–8 Lewis, David 30, 132, 145, 249 Libbman, Edward 59 Linton, Stanton 644 Liouville, ... 582 Pascal, Blaise 492 Peacocke, Christopher 39, 129, 133,479–81 Pearson, Karl 138, 148–50, 160, 353, 356, 365–6, ...
If our automaton supervenes on anything describable in the language of the physics, it must supervene, therefore, ... But there is also a fair amount of what Mark Wilson (2010: 934, 943) refers to as “physics avoidance”—a smoothing out ...
This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world.
The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time.
Physics Avoidance: And Other Essays in Conceptual Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wylie, Alison. 1997. “The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies.” Osiris 12, no. 1: 80–99.
... 79,227–229 physicalism, 117–118 physically impossible, 100 physically related, 96 physics avoidance, 268 physics of the rainbow, 230–231 planetary orbits, 215 platonism, 15, 26, 190,281 indispensability argument for.