Maren Bräutigam

In his recent book Knowing Science, Alexander Bird argues that scientific progress is to be understood in terms of the accumulation of knowledge (CK). To this end, he employs the method of conceptual analysis; i.e., he considers several (actual or hypothetical) cases and argues that CK does the best job in capturing our intuitions concerning the applicability of the concept ‘scientific progress’. In this review, I argue that the cases which Bird considers are not fully adequate for the sake at hand, because they describe progress towards science rather than progress within science (which I take the concept of scientific progress to be all about).

Broadly speaking, there are three views on whether Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) is violated in the case of similar particles. According to the earliest view, PII is always violated (call this the no discernibility view); according to the more recent weak discernibility view, PII is at least valid in a weak sense. No and weak discernibility have been referred to as orthodoxy. Steven French has argued that although PII is violated, similar particles can still be regarded as individuals, or, alternatively, as non-individuals: French famously concluded therefore that metaphysics is underdetermined by physics. Call this thesis orthodox underdetermination. Most recently, some authors have turned against orthodoxy by arguing that PII is valid in more than a weak sense – call this the new discernibility view, also referred to as heterodoxy. Since heterodoxy is backed up by physical considerations, metaphysics now seems to be determined by physics: physics indicates that PII is valid. In this paper, I argue that with respect to entangled states, there are two ways to establish PII’s validity, which yield two different ontological interpretations of entanglement. Therefore, a form of underdetermination returns within the heterodox framework. I argue that heterodox underdetermination deserves some attention, because the two ontological interpretations might yield different explanations of the violation of Bell inequalities.