Butterfield, Jeremy (2010) Against Pointillisme: a Call to Arms. [Preprint]

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Abstract

This paper forms part of a wider campaign: to deny pointillisme. That is the doctrine that a physical theory's fundamental quantities are defined at points of space or of spacetime, and represent intrinsic properties of such points or point-sized objects located there; so that properties of spatial or spatiotemporal regions and their material contents are determined by the point-by-point facts. Elsewhere, I argued against pointillisme about chrono-geometry, and about velocity in classical mechanics. In both cases, attention focussed on temporal extrinsicality: i.e. on what an ascription of a property implies about other times. Therefore, I also discussed the metaphysical debate whether persistence should be understood as endurance or perdurance. In this paper, I focus instead on spatial extrinsicality: i.e. on what an ascription of a property implies about other places. The main idea will be that the classical mechanics of continuous media (solids or fluids) involves a good deal of spatial extrinsicality---which seems not to have been noticed by philosophers, even those who have no inclination to pointillisme. I begin by describing my wider campaign. Then I present some elementary aspects of stress, strain and elasticity---emphasising the kinds of spatial extrinsicality they each involve. I conduct the discussion entirely in the context of `Newtonian' ideas about space and time. But my arguments carry over to relativistic physics.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Butterfield, Jeremy
Additional Information:	Forthcoming in ‘Explanation, Prediction and Confirmation: New Trends and Old Ones Reconsidered’, edited by: D. Dieks, W. Gonzalez, S. Hartmann, T.Uebel and M. Weber; to be published by Springer
Keywords:	Pointillisme, intrinsic properties, extrinsic properties, continuum mechanics, stress, strain, elasticity
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Depositing User:	Jeremy Butterfield
Date Deposited:	19 Sep 2010
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:20
Item ID:	5550
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Classical Physics General Issues > Models and Idealization General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Date:	September 2010
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/5550

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