Sabrina Hao

The referential status of theoretical terms has been at the center of the tension between scientific realism and theory change. On the one hand, descriptivist theories cannot account for referential success across theory changes; on the other hand, the causal theory of reference is accused of making reference too easy and fails to account for referential failure. Building on the work of Psillos (2012), I develop a refined version of the hybrid causal descriptivist theory in this paper. I first show how an exactly true causal description that survives through theory change is possible if we include the relevant experimental conditions and contexts. I then argue that the meaning of a scientific term fixed through a causal description consists of the referent only, which allows us to account for the complex linguistic behavior in the scientific community. At last, I draw from Donnellan’s (1966) distinction between attributive use and referential use of definite description to account for scientific terms that are introduced without being associated with any phenomenon.

In this paper, I explore the relation between actual scientific practice and conceptual interpretation of scientific theories by investigating the particle concept in non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM). On the one hand, philosophers have raised various objections against the particle concept within the context of NRQM and proposed alternative ontologies such as wave function realism, Bohmian particles, mass density field, and flashes based on different realist solutions to the measurement problem. On the other hand, scientists continue to communicate, reason, and explain experimental phenomena using particle terms in the relevant regimes. It has been explicitly argued and, for most of the time, implicitly assumed in the philosophical literature that we do not need to take scientists’ particle talk seriously, and recovering position measurement of particles in our ontological accounts is sufficient to make contact with scientific practice. In this paper, I argue that although scientific discourse does not postulate a uniform and coherent ontology, it nevertheless postulates real properties. Our ontological accounts thus need to recover the various properties associated with the NRQM particle concept in scientific discourse. I show that recovering these particle properties is not trivially achievable by pointing out some particular challenges these revisionary ontologies face in the process.