Elay Shech

This paper looks at the nature of idealizations and representational structures appealed to in the context of the fractional quantum Hall effect, specifically, with respect to the emergence of anyons and fractional statistics. Drawing on an analogy with the Aharonov–Bohm effect, it is suggested that the standard approach to the effects— the topological approach to fractional statistics—relies essentially on problematic idealizations that need to be revised in order for the theory to be explanatory. An alternative geometric approach is outlined and endorsed. Roles for idealizations in science, as well as consequences for the debate revolving around so-called essential idealizations, are discussed

Contemporary scholars are engaged in a debate over whether Charles Augustin Coulomb’s results that he presented in his 1785 and 1787 memoirs to the Paris Academy of Sciences were attained experimentally or theoretically. In this paper, we study Coulomb’s famous 1785 electric torsion balance experiment through analysis of relevant texts and, more importantly, through a replication that is more faithful to Coulomb’s original design than previous attempts. We show that, despite recent claims, it has so far proved impossible to obtain the same results reported by Coulomb in his paper of 1785, Coulomb’s published results are most likely atypical, and electric torsion balance experiments degenerate quickly when parameters are altered by small amounts. Acknowledgements: We wish to thank Jed Buchwald for generously making available the glass pieces of a torsion balance identical to that used by Alberto Martinez. Special thanks also to Paolo Palmieri for his important roles in replicating the electric torsion balance, discussing results and recording trials, as well as for the invaluable comments given on earlier drafts of this paper. A part of this paper was presented at the 2008 History of Science Society Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. We thank the participants of that meeting, especially Alberto A. Martinez, for helpful discussion and comments. Thank you also to Peter Heering for recent discussion and feedback. This research was supported by the Wesley C. Salmon fund, History and Philosophy of Science department, University of Pittsburgh.

Kevin Davey claims that the justification of the second law of thermodynamics as it is conveyed by the “standard story” of statistical mechanics, roughly speaking, that lowentropy microstates tend to evolve to high-entropy microstates, is “unhelpful at best and wrong at worst.” In reply, I demonstrate that Davey’s argument for rejecting the standard story commits him to a form of skepticism that is more radical than the position he claims to be stating and that Davey places unreasonable demands on the notion of justification in the physical sciences.

I present a novel approach to the scholarly debate that has arisen with respect to the philosophical import one should infer from scientific accounts of phase transitions by appealing to a distinction between representation understood as denotation, and faithful representation understood as a type of guide to ontology. It is argued that the entire debate is misguided, for it stems from a pseudo-paradox that does not license the type of claims made by scholars and that what is really interesting about phase transitions is the manner by which they force us to rethink issues regarding scientific representation, idealizations, and realism

In this paper I show how certain requirements must be set on any tenable account of scientific representation, such as the requirement allowing for misrepresentation. I then continue to argue that two leading accounts of scientific representation— the inferential account and the interpretational account—are flawed for they do not satisfy such requirements. Through such criticism, and drawing on an analogy from non-scientific representation, I also sketch the outline of a superior account. In particular, I propose to take epistemic representations to be intentional objects that come with reference, semantic contents and a representational code, and I identify faithful representations as representations that act as guides to ontology.