Paul Teller

Science is widely taken to aim, and often to succeed, in producing truths, a “mirror of nature”. Not so. Instead, science fashions models, understood broadly as representations that are never both completely precise and completely accurate. . This chapter discusses how the misconception arose and how it is now being corrected. The account begins with a tension between the founding metaphors of the Scientific Revolution, reading God’s book of nature and the clock metaphor. The former pre-frames laws and physics fundamentalism; the latter the discovery of mechanisms, how things work. Laws aimed at truth, but the world is too complicated for us to get generalizations exactly right. Likewise, the complexity of mechanisms always requires simplifying idealization. Further, different problems require different idealizations and so a pluralism of accounts. The pluralism is unproblematic as different problems about the same subject matter can be consistently dealt with using very different schemes of simplification.

If the semantic value of predicates are, as Williamson assumes, properties, then epistemicism is immediate. Epistemicism fails, so also this properties view of predicates. I use examination of Williamsons position as a foil, showing that his two positive arguments for bivalence fail, and that his efforts to rescue epistemicism from obvious problems fail to the point of incoherence. In Part II I argue that, despite the properties view’s problems, it has an important role to play in combinatorial semantics. We may separate the problem of how smallest parts of language get attached to the world from the problem of how those parts combine to form complex semantic values. For the latter problem we idealize and treat the smallest semantic values as properties (and referents). So doing functions to put to one side how the smallest parts get worldly attachment, a problem that would just get in the way of understanding the combinatorics. Attachment to the world has to be studied separately, and I review some of the options. As a bonus we see why, mostly, higher order vagueness is an artifact of taking properties as semantic values literally instead of as a simplifying idealization.

In the contemporary discussion of hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics, much attention has been paid to the “no hidden variable” proof contained in an important paper of Kochen and Specker. It is a little noticed fact that Bell published a proof of the same result the preceding year, in his well-known 1966 article, where it is modestly described as a corollary to Gleason's theorem. We want to bring out the great simplicity of Bell's formulation of this result and to show how it can be extended in certain respects

One can give a strong sense to the idea that a relation does not 'reduce' to non-relational properties by saying that a relation does not supervene upon the non-relational properties of its relata. That there are such inherent relations I call the doctrine of relational holism, a doctrine which seems to conflict with traditional ideas about physicalism. At least parts of classical physics seem to be free of relational holism, but quantum mechanics, on at least some interpretations, incorporates the doctrine in an all pervasive way

If we take the state function of quantum mechanics to describe belief states, arguments by Stairs and Friedman-Putnam show that the projection postulate may be justified as a kind of minimal change. But if the state function takes on a physical interpretation, it provides no more than what I call a fortuitous approximation of physical measurement processes, that is, an unsystematic form of approximation which should not be taken to correspond to some one univocal "measurement process" in nature. This fact suggests that the projection postulate does not provide a proper locus for interpretive investigation. Readers will also find section 3's analysis of fortuitous approximations of independent interest and presented without the perils of quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a subject that has captured the imagination of a surprisingly broad range of thinkers, including many philosophers of science. Quantum field theory, however, is a subject that has been discussed mostly by physicists. This is the first book to present quantum field theory in a manner that makes it accessible to philosophers. Because it presents a lucid view of the theory and debates that surround the theory, An Interpretive Introduction to Quantum Field Theory will interest students of physics as well as students of philosophy. Paul Teller presents the basic ideas of quantum field theory in a way that is understandable to readers who are familiar with non-relativistic quantum mechanics. He provides information about the physics of the theory without calculational detail, and he enlightens readers on how to think about the theory physically. Along the way, he dismantles some popular myths and clarifies the novel ways in which quantum field theory is both a theory about fields and about particles. His goal is to raise questions about the philosophical implications of the theory and to offer some tentative interpretive views of his own. This provocative and thoughtful book challenges philosophers to extend their thinking beyond the realm of quantum mechanics and it challenges physicists to consider the philosophical issues that their explorations have encouraged.

In practice theoretical terms are open-ended in not being attached to anything completely specific. This raises a problem for scientific realism: If there is no one completely specific kind of thing that might be in the extension of “atom”, what is it to claim that atoms exist? A realist’s solution is to say that in theoretical contexts of mature atom-theories there are things that play the role of atoms as characterized in that theory-context. The paper closes with a laundry list of problems that this more careful statement of scientific realism still faces.