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Conference Paper: Realism about quantities?

TitleRealism about quantities?
Authors
Issue Date2015
Citation
The 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (CLMPS 2015), Helsinki, Finland, 3-8 August 2015. How to Cite?
AbstractA realist about quantities holds that measurement procedures give us knowledge about quantities, where the latter are understood as entities that are in some relevant sense independent of the particular measurement procedures employed to determine them. An anti-realist about quantities holds that we can make sense of our measurement practices without introducing quantities as independent entities. With the development of formal measurement theory, which captures a wide range of measurement scales, there seems to be less need for realism about quantities. In this paper I argue in favor of a more realist approach to quantities, and lay out some conditions such a realism has to respect. A main consideration in favor of realism is the idea that in the establishment of a measurement scale, not just anything goes. A particular way of setting up such a scale is appropriate for a particular kind of quantity. I suggest that this appropriateness is best captured by assuming that the measurement aims to get right something about an independent entity. To avoid the restrictions of traditional realism about quantities, however, we must respect the idea that quantities can have different “structures”, captured by scales at different levels of fine-grainedness. I suggest that the best way to do so is structural realism about quantities. Structural realism about quantities is the idea that quantities are structures, characterized as relations among “positions”, which may or may not be occupied. Understanding quantities as structures permits us to characterize a plurality of possible values for a quantity like mass, even in the absence of a large number of massive objects. This is an advantage both over nominalistically understood representationalism, and property based realism.
DescriptionSession - B3.11 Metaphysical Issues in the Philosophy of Science
Persistent Identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/230589

 

DC FieldValueLanguage
dc.contributor.authorWolff, JE-
dc.date.accessioned2016-08-23T14:17:55Z-
dc.date.available2016-08-23T14:17:55Z-
dc.date.issued2015-
dc.identifier.citationThe 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (CLMPS 2015), Helsinki, Finland, 3-8 August 2015.-
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10722/230589-
dc.descriptionSession - B3.11 Metaphysical Issues in the Philosophy of Science-
dc.description.abstractA realist about quantities holds that measurement procedures give us knowledge about quantities, where the latter are understood as entities that are in some relevant sense independent of the particular measurement procedures employed to determine them. An anti-realist about quantities holds that we can make sense of our measurement practices without introducing quantities as independent entities. With the development of formal measurement theory, which captures a wide range of measurement scales, there seems to be less need for realism about quantities. In this paper I argue in favor of a more realist approach to quantities, and lay out some conditions such a realism has to respect. A main consideration in favor of realism is the idea that in the establishment of a measurement scale, not just anything goes. A particular way of setting up such a scale is appropriate for a particular kind of quantity. I suggest that this appropriateness is best captured by assuming that the measurement aims to get right something about an independent entity. To avoid the restrictions of traditional realism about quantities, however, we must respect the idea that quantities can have different “structures”, captured by scales at different levels of fine-grainedness. I suggest that the best way to do so is structural realism about quantities. Structural realism about quantities is the idea that quantities are structures, characterized as relations among “positions”, which may or may not be occupied. Understanding quantities as structures permits us to characterize a plurality of possible values for a quantity like mass, even in the absence of a large number of massive objects. This is an advantage both over nominalistically understood representationalism, and property based realism.-
dc.languageeng-
dc.relation.ispartofCongress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, CLMPS 2015-
dc.titleRealism about quantities?-
dc.typeConference_Paper-
dc.identifier.emailWolff, JE: jwolff@hku.hk-
dc.identifier.authorityWolff, JE=rp01643-
dc.identifier.hkuros262159-

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