Structural distinctions — entities, structures & changes in science

0:00 All over the place, examples that are a tough example, we see kind of causing in staff facilities work, and a number of other places, including Warren's work, but just on the first ether, calorics. Of course, this is really bad for all of us, because like I said, they don't want to reference for all of us, because I don't need to work. So the realist response to this might be something like, okay, only most, most, it's most of our theories are approximately true, or mostly approximately true, so you can soften your realist position and look at it and not commit to the entire theory, right? The anti-realist response to this, ah, ah, approximate truth, what does this mean, and you head off down the road into very similitude or truth-rightness, and we haven't done an adequate theory of that yet. so the interviewer is going to reject that response and also is concerned with historical reconstructions from the history of science so you get debates between someone like Static Silas and Asop Chang over the nature of I can't even pronounce it I think that where we're at right now what most of the discussions as far as I can see three sessions that we've had on this topic this weekend is about preservative realism This I see is coming in more or less three forms, although this is a bit disingenuous. There's entity realism, of course. Dead, hacking, hard, right. Essential realism, I'm really using this to characterize something like Silas's position or Kitcher's position. We sort of want to pick out that which was essential, whatever it was, that gets us our predictions that are confirmed. Although this is really a marker, a place marker, for anything that we want to pick out, the case that I'm talking about today, structure. So, a quick review now of Oral's structural realism. Now, this is his old structural realism. Of course, he's called a chapter at the end of Zepard's book, the appendix there, on structural realism, which uses Ramsey's sentences to defend structural realism. I have terrible problems with that myself. reduces to a form of empiricism that I don't think no person will have much trouble with in fact, I think it's based on a view an old, positivistic view of what anti-realism is supposed to be and so I think I'm going to leave that aside today and deal with what was historical realism as we know it from this 89 paper

2:30 ok, so we see remarkable continuity in mathematical structure in the history of science so we can defend ourselves against the pessimistic by purely to mathematical structures rather than the whole theories. And not only do we see this continuity in the equations of our theories, but we need to see the continuity across the transitions throughout history. We need to be able to see from one theory to another that structure is preserved. It's not a matter of picking out structure synchronically. This has to be a diachronic thesis. And then something might appeal to a structural model of his argument. When we see structural continuities across the transition, we can be justified in believing in the structure of our theories, just not their theoretical content. So we have to appeal to mathematical structure in making something like the best explanation on mathematical structure. This, he thinks, explains the theoretical discontinuity. So it's an explanatory thesis, right? It's going to explain how the history of science has progressed, and in fact it's explaining the realist debate and the problems that we have with the realist debate. This example, Frenel's theory, is the best one. We move from the elastic-solid-eth theory to Maxwell's electromagnetic field, but of course the mathematical equations drop out from Maxwell's theory. So the Fresnel equations are meant in case of Maxwell's equations. Fresnel theory was accurate because of the correct structure. We've got the relations that will be optimal to come on the right, but not the ontology. This is all familiar stuff, especially well-articulated in Silas's book. What we haven't focused on too much is what was used in the correspondence principle. This is something that I just thought about, the notion that any form of realism has to have a notion of correspondence of one form or another. Now, in this case, it's going to be a correspondence of mathematical structure. The mathematical equations of the old theory are limiting cases of those of mu, explaining the lack of identity of equations through theory transition. When we don't have identity, like you might get with the Fnell and Maxwell cases, there's some way that we can pick out similar mathematical structure. He's appealed to the correspondence principle. It's supposed to be about workforce. Correspondence principle is vague, right? This will probably come up at the end, if not, then.

5:00 Carl Hafer asked yesterday what about the mathematical structure is limited to our mathematical and physical theories, right? One response might appeal to a broader notion of what correspondence is. I think that that's a nice approach, but it falls into the problem of inserting ontology here, right? So how are you going to remain purely structural if you're committed to that as your way of escaping the presence of the conduct without sort of inserting through a order that corresponds to ontology? Also, it's interesting because structural realism gives up an explanation, right, in some sense. You know, problematic concepts, Warwell says, like action at a distance can now be accepted because we don't care about the ontology, right. My concern there is explanation is an important part of justifying scientific realism. So this is a concern that I have at the moment with general structural realist approaches is how you're supposed to get some notion of realism. Realism in a strong sense, right, that's going to defend the pessimist against the pessimistic induction from something that's willing to accept action at a distance. Okay, so that's Worrell's view in general. Problems for Worrell. The first three problems are not mine. Of course, they're ripped off from other people. What is structure? It seems to me the structure can be catched out in abstract or concrete terms. We now know, thanks to the honest, I don't know if you go through this, what abstract and concrete more or less mean. And even as objection arises, if you deal with an emotional structure that's abstract, you just get the cardinality of the main objects in your form. And so structural realism is either going to be trivial, because you just get cardinality, or it's going to be false, because you're starting to insert more than just pure relations. You start knowing something about the relations themselves. If structure, on the other hand, is concrete, and you're talking about specific relations between the entities, something about which you know, then structural realism is going to collapse into a full-blown realism, because structure in nature lands something like a continuum. It's a Silas's point that you raised in our scene as well, for the example of mass. The problem of continuity across theoretical transition isn't sufficient. This is also one of Silas's points. We need an argument to show that mathematical equations really do represent the world themselves. How do you justify the confirmation to a theory right? Just going to mathematics instead of the theory as a whole.

7:30 We're going to need some kind of an inverse-to-best explanation argument, but such an argument would be invalid that the structure would need some kind of theoretical interpretation in order to get confirmation because in order to get some kind of prediction you're going to have to insert some causality assumptions, some initial conditions into your equations, right? So you're starting to put ontology into your mathematics, right, to get your confirmation. And at the bottom here, a couple other problems that I know they're kicking around out there, but I'm not going to associate any name in particular with them. The one that Carl Eckhart raised yesterday seems to be a problem for me. Structural realism seeking us into mathematical sciences. Nice examples in mathematical sciences. But, you know, there's a whole bunch of science out there. Now, if you're trying to answer the pessimistic induction in a general blanket way, right, then you have to be able to expand your notion of what structure is to cover those different sciences. Now, if it happens to all be cashed out mathematically, that's really nice for the structural realist, right? And thumbs up, I've proven that, but I'm about to see it done and I haven't seen it done yet. Lastly, what is similar structure? We've got a couple of notions here. Similarity is the one I want to focus on. What is the notion of similarity? How do we catch this out in different domains and to different degrees? There are different depths. A classic example is that between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, right? You can form quantum mechanics that are very similar to classical mechanical velocity equations. But the mathematical objects are actually very different. So obviously between quantum mechanics we're dealing with operators in a complex health space, and classical mechanics then we're dealing with continuous field value functions. These are different objects. We need to nail down what this initial similarity is and how it's going to work. Okay, now, how can Ramsey's Sentence Realism solve all of these problems? Well, ultimately I don't think it can, but I think you can make a fairly good crack at it. The idea behind Ramsey's Sentence Realism, a la Cruz and Havanaugh, is just like any other form of ramification, except where you draw the line of what is a theoretical term and what is not a theoretical term, right? So, referential statements of a theoretical term is going to be of relevance to the realism base, as they think. If your Ramsey sentence of a theory is successful, and approximately true, it can justify a realism about Ramsey sentences of our theory.

10:00 We know what a Ramsey sentence is, strip out the names of your entities and your placement of variables, and they're essentially quantified over the whole rule. In this way, you're not going to need correct reference in order to generate a no-miracle's argument. So your ranty's sentence is approximately true because it's existential claims are approximately true. So it would be a miracle for our theory to be successful if their ranty's sentence is reported. How does it solve all those problems? Now this bit is my interpretive work. So if Prism Happenu, or anyone else, were to take a crack at a rantification process into some of the things that I see with it, or indeed was to a further change in the ways I'm interpreting their view, then it might stand a much better chance of nailing down an answer to the person's potential induction. First of all, it seems that their anti-sentence is going to have to be concrete and abstract, and not subject to meaningful rejection, for the reason that when you strip out the names of your entities, and are no longer committed to things like electrons, you've still got So now, you know why I'm concerned with this being, you know, a structural realist account. It's much broader than the structure that we're familiar with. There's no arbitrary distinction between structure and nature on this account, because then all theoretical properties of themselves are going to be structural. And you can get to walk under the structural description through properties and relations that these entities have associated with them in the Vancey-Symtons class. So you don't have to worry about this distinction between what structure and nature is, and become a structure in some sense, but it's a very broad notion. But theories don't rely upon continuity of mathematics, and the continuity of Ramsey's sentence is right. It has a partial interpretation. This means you're not stuck with just mathematical interpretation on your best experiences of mathematics. You can easily capture, therefore, theoretical continuity outside of the mathematical sciences. You're not stuck with mathematical differences. And then lastly, a similar structure could be identified with Ramsey sentences. This seems perfectly well defined if you've got an identity of Ramsey sentences plus theory of transition. That's very straightforward. Or you can imagine one Ramsey sentence to be a subgroup or another Ramsey sentence.

12:30 And you can see your similarity across theoretical transition fairly clearly in that case. Okay, so, what are the problems? Oh, you've probably guessed a bunch of these already. How does an anti-sentence itself... I'm sorry, I'm absolutely clear. Let's decide what it's going to do between an anti-sentence and what it's done. Now, this is the old concern about where are we going to draw our line, right? What are we going to pick out as believing in and not believing in? It's going to collapse into empiricism, as I think it does with Zahar and Warhol. Unless you do something other than draw the line of the observable-unobservable distinction, right? They choose to, following David Lewis, and define what is theoretical is just that which is not antecedently understood. And so a lot of their position hangs on this notion of what is antecedently understood. It means here that the meaning of a term is going to be derived outside of the theory in question. So the meaning of a term is going to be derived outside of the theory in question. So the meaning of a term is going to be derived outside of the theory in question. If it pops up later in Paul's model, it's not going to be a theory, it's going to be an old term, it's going to be an observational term if you want to be very loose in your language, right? The idea here is that interestingly understood terms are those that pop up in previously accepted theories, right? Antisemitic understood doesn't, though, tie our old terms to reality. The ultimate truth of our runaway sentence is going intimately dependent upon how our antisemitic understood terms get hooked on to reality. In David Lewis's account, right, he starts off with a previously defined language when he's talking about how to define theoretical terms. So, cruising happiness appears as if everything works here, because they don't have a previously defined language, right? There are several directions that you go in. in a circular direction, they think, well, he's got a slightly different project, I think, right? Their project is going to bottom out with a primitive language that is not theory-laden, it's observationally neutral, and it's supposed to provide us with a foundation from which we can build a theory to start with, to start off with our old terms, right, and introduce theoretical terms, okay? It's a very interesting approach. I'd love to see it work, but I'm There is this problem of then leaning downward and seeing what you understood is with some sort of basis. I don't think they've satisfied that. Also, whether or not it's possible to satisfy such a basis is problematic.

15:00 We know that it's been under the term. Strongness in the description in the 60s and 70s is that all observational language is heavily theory-based. So I'm not sure how one is even going to get off the ground on a non-theoretical basis. And fourth, the Ramsey-Sentance approach collapses into realism to a degree that variables retain all the same properties that were possessed by a constant of their in place. Okay, so this, obviously in my explication of their position, I have some concern about what it is you're doing when you ramseify a theory. So if you're taking away the name, so you're not committed to these entities any longer, how is that different from being committed to everything but a linguistic symbol, in a sense, right? If it's that weak, then you're still at all one list, okay? You just change the name in your theory. So you're not going to escape the pessimistic matter of induction, right? If it's something stronger, you start limiting properties and relations that are attached to your objects that you're dealing with in a random sentence, that's great. you need to start putting down conditions, right, for how you're going to go about doing that. And that is, again, just like drawing a line, where we're going to draw this line, which hasn't been done yet. Okay, so that's the position. These are the problems that I see popping up for it. I don't think that I've built a straw man here. As far as I can tell from their paper, this is what's going on for them. And yet they haven't, of course, argued against the pessimistic induction direction. My concern, though, is that perhaps you might also be able to generate ramses sentences That would be a nice project for one time later in the future. One they don't think is going to deny their position, but they're open to the fact that it might. So, it seems then in conclusion that Ramsey's sentence realism appears to solve all of the structural realists' most pressing concern, but it should be rejected as not pessimistic induction. Because it collapses, I think, in its current form, because it's all going to science with realism. If it doesn't, they've got to follow the drawing line. And the line that, while they are drawing in a similar way, and I think it's the empiric system. Thank you. Eleven minutes remain for questions. Well, just as you also have worries about the Ramsey sentence approach, and in a sense I don't see how it fits well with one of the words you mentioned before, quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, and say, well, their ontologies are different.

17:30 They're mathematical ontologies, right? When vectors in human spaces, you have functions, right? If you look at the M-Ramsey sentences, the corresponding Ramsey sentences for each of these theories, what the Ramsey sentence does is, well, as you said, we replace the terms in the language by existentially quantified variables. Now, what that does, in a sense, is increase the number of possible models of the sentence. Because now you have all these new different ways you can actually satisfy the sentence. And in principle, that could even increase the ontology. Now you can actually be, who knows, whatever you're ranging over. and which can be taken as an advantage depending on how you read the models for a disadvantage so on the advantage side is well now you could actually say well i would have perhaps factors in hubert spaces i may have continuous function as long as there's enough structure that you satisfy the relevant pharmacy sentence, I would be just fine for that. And the disadvantage, on the other hand, is that it's no longer clear about the concrete abstractness where exactly you're going to draw. Now, I find it extremely telling, the fact that scientists never, ever, pharmacy five. That should tell us something about the relevance of actually thinking about this as a sort of way of cashing out scientific theory. So you might have an interesting philosophical story, but it's just irrelevant for scientific practice, period. So what's the point? Yeah, that's excellent. I suppose in the concern about where you draw that line and how soft your structure is. Nancy asked me a couple of years ago, you know, Ramsey sentences and equations, How do they translate to one another? I'm not satisfied at the moment that you can do an adequate translation into classical and quantum mechanics that is nice and hard the way I think the structure is. It may be possible.

20:00 on the other hand when you look at what science does and how science is practiced would we expect would we require to do ramifications in order to justify our philosophical arguments about the pessimistic induction and whether or not we can justify the numerical argument that's not clear to me I know we want to be able to reflect in our methods the scientific method itself especially if we take it to be a naturalistic thesis but I don't think that that's what especially Zahar In fact, he's really concerned that this is a metaphysical thesis, not a scientific thesis. So, that's a different concern. I'm a bit provoking, and I agree with everything you said. There have been two important uses of the Ram's descendants. Both of them are obsolete. We should stop worrying about Ram's descendants. One of them was in the context of the original Ramsey paper, where you've got the Hilbert style formalization of theories, which is called open formulas, and the word is what the interpretation is, and Ramsey puts existential quantifiers in form to turn the open formulas into sentences, and then say that they are true of the value of them. The second is Karnap, who uses it to draw the distinction between analytic and synthetic components of the theory. Now, both of these projects are kind of obsolete. I don't see any other use of their ancestors. You're a hard man. You're a hard man. You think there is? I think Morrill certainly would think there is. In that way, John is a good friend and a good philosopher. He thinks there is a use, but I think Giovede does it there. I don't think there's anything to be gained by writing. I think the use, especially in the appendix to Zeohar's problem, if you could accomplish a justification, some form of realism, it goes beyond just the observable priming. And in their case, I think it blossoms out to sort of universal generalizations, which, as far as I know, someone like I'm passing, wouldn't be too opposed to the guiding principle observables, right? So, if they could generalize some justification, believing in something beyond the observables, they tell you, right, then surely that's something.

22:30 Yeah, but going beyond the observable, but stopping sort of what? Yeah, right. Yes. Because if you can do it the standard realist way, more important, that's what I'm saying. There's a crucial distinction or difference between a world and Sahar use of transcendence and Cruz and Papineau. Oh, yes. And it's a multiple realizability thing that Ottavio is referring to. It doesn't really arise here because in your slide you have that uniqueness realisation. operator in phones, like Lewis does. The IOTA symbol? Do you have a slide? That depends on the logic you use. You change the logic and this goes to the window. We know Lewis was using Scott's free logic. That depends. The structure of your argument, that you first raised numerous problems for world's original 89 position and then you say that Ramsey you know Cruz and Papineau Ramsey and the realism can solve these um well sure uh because it's not a structural realist position I mean it doesn't I agree yeah that's right so so in a way but But you have that in your last slide, in your point four, so I find it really perplexing to see the overarching argument here. There are problems with structural realism. This realist position solves them. Sure, it's not the structural realist position. It's getting rid of the names and referring to objects by quantifiers. That razor edge that you're walking on is a structural risk between what you can and cannot legitimize in what you call structure. And this goes back to the way the Silas characterized the debate. As soon as you start incorporating into a notion of structure, something that's not pure, pure structure, the kind of structure, the subject of Newman objection, then you start incorporating a softer, more concrete notion of structure, and you start getting into ontological problems. exactly what these guys, I think, have done? Well, Cruz and Popinus are very explicit about not advocating any folk structural wills. Their idea is fully contained in the intuition about being able to... the notion of approximate

25:00 truth purely in terms of Ramsey sentences, and as far as I'm concerned that it doesn't What is the kind of approximate existence? Okay, first point, if they deny structural realism altogether, that's fine. It's a name, it's a label, right? There are some similarities in approaches between this, perhaps, and Warhol's approach that I'm concerned with, right? On the other hand, then, the concern here is this attempt to provide across the board, like, some wholesale response to the pessimistic meta-induction, in this particular way, is very peculiar, right? you're smuggling the reference back in. You're smuggling the reference without anteceding the understood, right? So what I wanted to do today was show, this is definitely not, I think, a way to go. There is a lot, I thought, if I thought we could defend this notion of anteceding the understood, that would be fantastic, right? Do we have time for questions? One more question. Go on. I'm no friend of the Ramsey sentence, of course. But first of all, the point that Octavio made just earlier, think it's quite clear that you don't have an increase in ontology because, I mean, you can derive the Ramsey sentence from your theory, but you can't do it the other way around. It's actually, it's a weaker logical claim. And in fact, the fact that there's more models that satisfy, that satisfy is just basically saying, well, I'm agnostic here. So it's got Well, it's got to be one of these models, that's correct. But I'm agnostic which one it is. I'm not advocating Ramsey-centered structural realism, so let's move all to a different point. The other point is what you said about, so what about all these other sciences? And they don't seem to be too mathematical. So what happens with structural realism there? I would think that it should be quite obvious to all of us here, that if we look at all these other sciences in 100 years from now, a lot of these theories that they advocate now are going to be thrown away, because it seems to me that the best way to test your theory is actually through mathematical. That's the way you get the most

27:30 precise predictions that can be tested heavily, can be tested more... So this is sort of a whole, you may take this to be then, the conclusion you take is the other sciences should be cashed out in the mathematical term, and they will be in the future. Well, maybe not, maybe not because people are not always rational, but if they want to say something about the world, they better start mathematizing. That's fine. Like I said, the concern that I have about magnetization has to be with how we get realism out of mathematical structure. And to the degree that you think that you can provide a structural explanation that is going to provide you with realism, you get into debates, of course, about what an explanation is supposed to be, right? A lot of them, of course, will include not just the And that's problematic, I think, for the realist that takes this approach. We need to move on. Thank you. Our final speaker is Angela Che, from the University of Leeds, speaking on structural decisions, entities, structures, and changes in science. As you are honest today, I realize that I couldn't speak about this stuff in Leeds without coming here, but as a matter of fact, they never listen to what I say, so I don't know what I say to do the job. Let's see what happens. Now, this is more or less what I intend to do today. Push it up a bit. There you go. my idea more or less is the following world has presented but he's not he's not the only one before him point career did it einst post did it suggesting the ideas that probably and the structuralist understanding of our scientific theories especially when

30:00 we go to physics can can constitute a response to pessimistic matter that we seem to drop the ontology of our theories, even the most successful, when the time comes in, when new recalcitrant empirical evidence comes. Now, my claim here is that if we look at this, if we bring together all the evidence raised by water and not only death, we end up in a situation in which if we want to support a structuralist understanding of the theory, which is even realist we have to retune the original moral intuition what i suggest that we're dealing with an epistemical priority between the structure of the theory and the entities of the theory it is because they the the entities are these things i would suggest you that probably we're dealing with the ontological priority of the structures of the theory to over the Something that looks pretty much similar to what French and Lady Mac have said when they talk about reconceptualize the entities in terms of structure. Now, the strategy I will follow is more or less a critical examination of what Warren is saying. And so, sorry, Stadis, I'll not disagree with you today. And it seems to be a confusory for every structural realist and how I'm not perspective over to that. And the examination of a historical text, namely the prediction of the Zeman effect in Lorenz' framework, Let's start with what I think is the gist of world view. I think this being more or less... Higher. Higher, sorry. Now, I think this is what, the base of the position, trying to completely misidentify the nature of the light, but nevertheless, it is no miracle that this theory enjoy the empirical statistician success that it means. It is not a miracle because for now theory, as science later saw it, attributing to light the right structure. Now, what is the right structure? What does it mean? Attributing the light the right structure.

32:30 This equation expresses relation, and if the equation remains true, it is because the relation presents the reality. Now, I know that very frequently this position has been presented as committed to some form of mathematical realism or whatever. It seems to me quite unfair with the position. What Poincare says, what Moral makes Poincare say in this case, is simply that what we're a relation among the items in the world. What we can know are the relations among the items. We talk about the equation, of course, because we are representing with the equations what happens in the world, and when we change our theories, and the framework of the theory describes new situations and involves new empirical evidence comes in, well, everything is going to change, apart from that equation that comes in again, simply because it's still describing the original relation we got in the preceding theory, that's it. But now, the problem here is characterizing this distinction. In what time we should suppose that, we should assume that a realist can characterize the distinction between relations and the items in the world that seems to be unassessable to us. Well, I think that this makes, the way in which we do it, it makes a certain serious of form of realism we are endorsing. I've got here a couple of assumptions that I think the form of a systemic structural realism should in some way satisfy. The predictive effectiveness of the theory depends on the theory having lashed into the relational properties between the entities. So that's what Poincaré is saying, that's what world is the case. But now, the generally predictive power of the theory has to rely on that relational content, since the entities with their intrinsic property could be replaced. And this is my point here. What I do believe is that what a genuine epistemic structuralist is committed to, if you want to be a realist, is explaining, accounting for the non-minical argument, using this relational content of the theory. Because otherwise, I lose completely the track of the base on which kind of basis are realists

35:00 here, and on what is based the agnosticism about the properties of the entities. Here, we have to be able to account for the predictive success of the theory, adopting a perspective that says, well, essentially, when the theory delivers the great success, Well, this is done thanks to this stuff. Thanks to these relational properties that the theory captured. Still, we don't have a clear cut of what we mean here by relational properties. Well, I've got a candidate. I have to start including people to have a candidate. and they, this is what the metaphysics in town, this is they do, so if somebody doesn't agree, you'll have to agree with them. The basic intrinsic properties of those properties that, first, are independent from my companion and wrongliness, second, not disjunctive properties, third, not negation of disjunctive properties. What are the relational properties? Well, The property that the think has, exclusively in virtue of our accompanying things, and it's a sternal relation to these accompanying things. So, roughly speaking, what I mean here by intrinsic properties are those properties that we assume the entities the theory is talking about would have, even if the entity was the only thing composed in the world. So, if it's all alone, that electron must have something, and it's intrinsic, and that is unaccessible. That is what, in my opinion, worrel is meaning here, or more than worrel, Poincaré is meaning here with that Kantian flavor that comes from its position. What he's saying is, well, roughly speaking, when we talk about the items in the world, this is what remains hidden to our eyes. This is what we cannot assess. And in fact, theorists keep changing the picture of these items because we really don't assess them. Fair enough. Now, whereas when we deal with the properties that hang between these entities, we describe the behavior of these entities where there are other stuff around, well, those are the properties that are captured by the equation somehow, okay? Now, what if we can, what if we can, it somehow turns out that we cannot make any serious

37:30 We cannot do serious prediction without these properties, but it seems that here the systemic structural realism would be in serious trouble. Can we do with great science, with great prediction, with the flesh of Jesus, without the intrinsic properties of the entities? I think that this case shows that it's not very likely to happen. We have to use these kind of properties in certain circumstances. And here comes my case study. This is the equation of Lorentz. Lorentz derived this equation in a work in 1892 in an enormous memory in which what he's trying to do is simply bringing together the notion we have, the knowledge we have about electromagnetism and several of them is done especially mainly by German scientists to provide ethereal matter and show that embedding ethereal matter in Maxwell electromagnetism, you can solve all the problems and left open. It's an extremely complex theory. What is important here is that this equation describes the force acting on an electron, which is one of the members of Lorentz ontology, the other being the other. And what happens, roughly speaking, is that everything is as plain as cash down in terms of motion of the electrons in the other. And electromagnetism is described as the phenomenon that happens when the electron moves in together, and the electron is the fine ultimate building block of matter. That's it. The dual ontology perfectly working. And I would say really working, because in this picture, Lorentz, from the first derivation, is already capable to give you back Fresnel coefficients and Fresnel equations, and Maxwell a relation for the incompressibility of currents. So there are two relational constraints that are already acting on this theory and are acting, constraining the shape and the structure of the electron. The electron, to make possible having a mechanic, a dynamic here, is conceived as a rigid body. So this is a classical particle, okay? It's a small ball moving in the air, interacting with the air. In the paper I provide more details on this topic, but I don't have that time. Fair enough, what happens, happens that, more or less, what happens is that, let me qualify what happens here, happens that an experimental physicist, for example,

40:00 who was working on the interaction between magnetism and light in a period in which no No physicist thought that you can't ever show any serious interaction, considering that even Faraday failed in trying to detect this interaction, was carrying on experiments on the same basis of the work of Maxwell, doing it, using experimental apparatus a bit more sophisticated. Roland Gray, that meant for the United States the first Nobel Prize, an apparatus described by an American physicist. What Zeman was doing, more or less, is trying to detect the interaction between light disturbances in the path of a light beam when it passed through the magnetic field. In 1896, he succeeded, and he found out more or less what he describes here in in this memory. We found that the two gene lights, the spectrum lights deep of this beam of light, were distinctly widely. If the parent was cut off, they returned to their original position. Zeman is incredibly, incredibly accurate in penance and extremely accurate in describing everything that is actually in the art, because of course he is not sure. Every theorist he met in that period told him that this couldn't work. So he went back, in the second place he went back to lawrence with a description of this case and let's come up two days later he came up with this explanation this inspiration hangs on first of all just just ignore these steps for a moment If you take into account only this, the electron is treated essentially as an harmonic oscillator. This, just to come back to the distinction between properties and relations I did before, is impossible if you don't consider in this framework to not take the electron to be a rigid body, something that essentially acts like a planet, is turning around. And this is, the electromagnetic elements here have just, explain just what happens when this thing interacts with the electromagnetic thing, it's experiencing a force.

42:30 And this stuff here explains what Zeeman did, in a very peculiar way, because Zeeman went there simply saying, look, I'm detecting a widening in the lines of the spectrum of this And Lawrence replied, no, no, no, come back in the lab and you will see not only the widening, you will see the splitting that in certain cases is in a triplet and in certain cases in the doublet. The cases of the doublet are the cases in which you are detecting the impacting with this electromagnetic field, sorry, moving parallel to the electromagnetic field. The other case is when the motion is perpendicular, the impact is perpendicular. So you have these different factors depending on the direction, the directions of the detection. Lawrence came back and the description couldn't be more accurate than that. It was perfectly what happened. Not only happened this, but applying this model, you can derive the first measurement for the ratio between electromagnetic charge and mass of the electron, obtaining exactly the same values that Thomson obtained at the end of the same, in 1897, I think so, it's more or less the same time as Corina. So it was an impressive, incredibly accurate and impressive prediction and explanation of what is going on, but it depends terribly on adopting a classical model of the electron in which the electron is a sort of ball, which is exactly the kind of property that was completely dismissed, the kind of picture of the electron. It was completely dismissed with quantum mechanics. We don't reason anymore in that terms, because if you keep reasoning in that terms, you bump in all a series of problems dealing with point-current self-stress forces and problem balancing what happens when these electrons are moving around in space. It's not a reliable picture if you go a bit further than where Lorentz brought it. Fair enough. And now what? Well, it seems that any patterns account for, in a realist perspective, for what happens with theory

45:00 change are closed. Because even in this case, even structural, realist version of structural that Boral is advocating is blocked by... Yeah, yeah, I know it. I want you to pay attention to me. The point is, what is happening here? In my opinion, what is happening here is that we're dealing with a situation in which the distinction between... The distinction between intrinsic and relational elements in the description doesn't work, simply if we want to create a part of the theory for delivering this knowledge, and we want to be realist about that, and we take it to be the one that lasts when the theory change comes in, it doesn't work. It doesn't work because we cannot support no miracle argument in that way. It's not enough to explain why we deliver knowledge in that way, why we have predictivity in the theory. We have to introduce more stuff. But so what? So Van Frassen is right. Well, probably. But let's have a look at what happens in this case. Lorentz was used to call the electron electric ion. This stuff is not being designed as it was, in a completely rounded way. It was designed in that way. It was supposed to be a rigid body, because they needed the rigid body to make, to derive, in a corpuscular, molecular Maxwell relation for currents, again a relation. You want this stuff being a rigid body, because in that way you can describe the incompressibility of currents as the incompressibility of water. what you're saying essentially is that in a conductor the electricity is incompressible exactly by the same token because the water is incompressible in a time because it's got a molecular structure that keeps the things always at the same distance. So this was one of the elements. The other elements was that you knew from Fresnel before and Maxwell later a certain kind of relation concerning refraction and diffraction of light

47:30 and you didn't want to lose that. do is implementing in the theory assumption compatible with this, and the electron takes its shape. Now, this is another point. The fact that the intuitive properties are replacing new frameworks makes quite evident the point that the properties of the entities we introduce in the theories are heavily framework dependent. They depend from the needs, the epistemic, the pragmatics and so on, the people, the community building up the theory. The scientist is begging his money somewhere and he wants that this comes in, in the end that he's composing his ontology. So, it doesn't look like so extraordinary that this stuff is dismissed when the changes come. Because something, a lot of stuff, are changing. But what about the relational properties? The case I have shown you in this moment is quite striking because I didn't have enough time here to do that, but to show you all the passages, but Larmor, in the same year, generalize that model and obtain a relation again, an relation on the fret from the frequency. That relation is retrieving quantum mechanics. It's retrieving quantum mechanics when you do the theory of interference between light and magnetism using Schrodinger equation. All the models retrieve that relation. That relation comes back again and again. So even in this case, there's a mark of the success, the extraordinary success of the theory. A relation that comes from that theory, that springs from that framework, can be retrieved in other frameworks. So, I mean, moral observation that this stuff is highly reliable, well, it's not at all completely wrong. Now, it seems to me that what a realistic account of theory change involves, it involves an explanation of the movement of relationship between this relational element that seems to be fairly stable and far more theory and framework independent than the intrinsic properties of the entity. And they're all played by this intrinsic property that doesn't seem, do not seem, that we can't, don't seem capable to dismiss if we want to deliver knowledge. To me, this looks like a plausible way, sorry Stephen, it's plausible, a plausible way to interpret this claim, not a move away.

50:00 from Alex's elementary particle towards observable structure as maybe so well. I don't know. Can you go there to the top? I can't see it. There you go. So, the conceptualization of elements of elementary particle and so-called instruction is, you know, in individualistic terms, that's what seems to me being suggested by this case, that what we have to pay attention to when it comes to the theory change is not the fact that we're dealing with a framework that either is dismissing all the resources available, or is completely, must be interpreted in some word, an anteriorist picture, but simply we're dealing with stark evidence, in the case of theory change, of the fact that the relational structure, the relational properties that our best theory individuate in the world, is telling us which is the shape, which is the face of our intrinsic properties, because those intrinsic properties are just the function of the representation we're delivering in theory. So, I think that you're still here. I think the way that you presented this distinction between intrinsic properties and relational properties, that's what the structural realists are saying, that there are definitely a lot of problems. And it's their fault. A lot of people have used this terminology in treating poverty, including Maxwell and Warhol and Russell, all these people. But I did have many discussions with John about this, and he has given up on this notion of treating poverty. The main idea, the only way to draw this distinction, and I actually agree with this point, is that it's not as if you cannot know the intrinsic properties out there in the world, but you can only know the extrinsic properties.

52:30 You can know all the properties out there in the world, any properties, first order, second order, third order, whatever order they are, unlike what Maxwell is arguing. because he's arguing for this kind of distinction. But you can only know them up twice from autism. That's the difference. So once you make that distinction, then the whole game changes. Now, going to your case study, and the point that you raised there about using this classical model of an electron in the body, and then look, but still, they got this good result out of the theory. It's a simple point to raise that you can have a valid argument which has false premises, one or more false premises, and a true conclusion. Meaning that one of those false premises could be that premise about the election as a rigid body. So it shouldn't be surprising to us that we can employ things that can help us reach good conclusions predictions, all that stuff. What is important here to ask, once you do that, is try to get independent confirmation for each and every one of these elements. And you might just find out that these things are not independently confirmed. They're just, you know. The fact that they're not independently confirmed is a good thing. It's meant to be a good thing for somebody that believes that you're dealing with a structure and not with independent things there, but my concern is here is another. The case in which the claim that, surprisingly a claim, the claim that in this historical case we're dealing with something that can maybe depend from false premises or whatever, because this case meets all the requirements that a good realist would have to apply some form of numerical argument. I mean, this is a wonderful explanation, but it's not only that, it's a stark predictive success. So, It could be the case that there is something wrong in the picture, and suddenly that is, the picture has been dismissed. But it remains the fact that in other frameworks, even more successful than the Lorentz-Dior of Electrum, you still retrieve the kind of relation between the frequencies that you retrieve there. So, now, my worry is, okay, but what about the non-miracle argument? Let me come to the other worry, the one about the zoomings.

55:00 Well, if I can't know any kind of properties in this game, I got lost, which is the distinction between a structural realist as world conceivant, with the kind of warnings that despite the position, and a standard realist that can always say, well, sometimes we retrieve certain things, sometimes we retrieve others, but generally speaking, we have to be able to argue in favor of the theory, as we're trying to save, to maintain, as much as we can, providing a success. So I cannot anymore see a distinction between what Stadis is telling us and what John is telling us. So if I can know any kind of thing that the theory deployed, if that picture, that quotation from Poincaré, it doesn't hold anymore, if it's not the relational interesting for me, for the structural realist. I don't understand in which sense here we are structural realists. It is a relational element, it's just that it's not understood in the way that you put up there, the Lewis way. It's understood in a very different way. Basically, it's understood that anything that you can know out there in the world, anything, any properties, any relations, even relations that are out there in the world, you can only know up to eyes of autism. No, you can describe them in that way, but this is a confusion them and what they are, what they are are intrinsic or extrinsic relational properties. Certainly, they are not the description you are offering. That's what puzzled me a bit. This looks like a confusion between the way in which you describe things. I can reconstruct the theory using a kind of relational description. Okay, and so what? It remains the theory. The theory is speaking about introducing entities like electron, like heather, and so on and so forth. So the way in which I describe it is not very much to, it's not decisive in the ontology that you introduce. So the point is, yeah, my point is what they have in mind must be something that looks like that. It can maybe be the case that distinction is highly problematic. What I'm saying is you need a metaphysics telling me what is a relational problem, what makes the what is in the reality the relation you're talking about and what is the entity that is hidden the way we should describe it i leave it to you but tell me tell me that the ontological distinction or what the ontological distinction hangs on

57:30 I don't think it is. We can discuss it. Just a quick question. I didn't quite follow why the pretty question down the harmonic oscillator equation required conceiving of the electrons of the ball. It requires, that's the kind of picture that Lorentz offers. And he treated the thing as a rigid body. So now I lose the, I cannot see how you can build up the nature of your morning masturbator is that is that is not reaching by your being to some mechanical classical mechanical and show me how I have a question about relational properties are preserved the theory change, and then it dismisses the way Stephen, for example, tried to catch this out. Because one worry is this, what exactly is it that is preserved? Right here. It really cannot be the extension of those relations, because those are changing. The objects that the past leaders were talking about are different from the objects that we're talking about. You can say, well, maybe it's the meaning of those relations. Also, that's not often. It's very different. The issue about commensurability that we theorize. So you can say, well, maybe there's some formal property of this. Some sort of mapping. But then, it's not the relation that is preserved, but the form of the relation. And that's something... This looks too syntactic. Well, it's very syntactic, but it's very weak. Because then you say, well, I'm just preserving, say, if you're talking about isomorphies, I'm actually preserving a particular equivalence relation. Well, that's extraordinarily general. No, no, I see that as a problem. I'm not saying that it's a solved problem. I got one of the motivations, the one to go in that direction is listed. Let me say something about your more strictly related point. And that kind of relations are retrieved anytime you're speaking of the same context, of the same domain. You don't retrieve the relations, you don't simply retrieve abstractly the relations of the fragment of the frequency introduced,

1:00:00 alarm or generalization of Lorentz's model. In every context, you retrieve them when you're dealing with that kind of interactions. So, my way to go would be something that looks like, well, let's have a look to the specific context in which these relations are retrieved, and see which are the similarities between the two concepts. It seems to me that what happens, more or less, is that we're saying very similar things about the two things. And of course, I agree with you, since now the two general frameworks are changing, there are loads of stuff that is not overlapping So, I mean, I take your point that that's really easy now. One more question. Oh, yeah, that's it. It's really just a clericatory question, because you started out by saying that the position you were going to end up with was close to the French lady of its position, and you cited the differences, right? That's my question. Okay, good. I'm asking you as much as we have. This counts as a double question, and I have no answer to double questions. So, the idea is that there's going to be a position that resembles or is quite close to French and Lady's position, with the differences you cited at the end. But the position that I think you described was quite a balanced position, which actually I'm very attracted to. In fact, I think I actually agree with what you said. And I think it is quite some distance from what French and Lady are saying for the following reason. the relational properties are reserved, right? And that in these different successive frameworks, we're dealing with, you know, completely different ontologies, but there's a kind of preservation of these relational properties. Well, I think it's a very old-fashioned account of ontology that says that what defines, you know, a particular set of things are all of its intrinsic properties. And as soon as you change some of those, right, we're dealing with a completely different set of things. In fact, I see no reason not to think of the relevant, you know, object.