Rosaler, Joshua (2015) Local Reduction in Physics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 50. pp. 54-69. ISSN 1355-2198

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Abstract

A conventional wisdom about the progress of physics holds that successive theories wholly encompass the domains of their predecessors through a process that is often called “reduction.” While certain influential accounts of inter-theory reduction in physics take reduction to require a single “global” derivation of one theory’s laws from those of another, I show that global reductions are not available in all cases where the conventional wisdom requires reduction to hold. However, I argue that a weaker “local” form of reduction, which defines reduction between theories in terms of a more fundamental notion of reduction between models of a single fixed system, is available in such cases and moreover suffices to uphold the conventional wisdom. To illustrate the sort of fixed-system, inter-model reduction that grounds inter-theoretic reduction on this picture, I specialize to a particular class of cases in which both models are dynamical systems. I show that reduction in these cases is underwritten by a mathematical relationship that follows the broad prescriptions of Nagel/Schaffner reduction, and support this claim with several examples. Moreover, I show that this broadly Nagelian analysis of inter-model reduction encompasses several cases that are sometimes cited as instances of the “physicist’s” limit-based notion of reduction.

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Item Type:	Published Article or Volume
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Rosaler, Joshua rosaler@post.harvard.edu
Keywords:	reduction, emergence, local, global, models, Nagel, limits
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Depositing User:	Dr. Joshua Rosaler
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2015 14:01
Last Modified:	05 Nov 2015 14:01
Item ID:	11754
Journal or Publication Title:	Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
Publisher:	Elsevier
Official URL:	http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S...
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Date:	19 March 2015
Page Range:	pp. 54-69
Volume:	50
ISSN:	1355-2198
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11754

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• Local Reduction in Physics. (deposited 21 Mar 2015 18:20)
  • Local Reduction in Physics. (deposited 05 Nov 2015 14:01) [Currently Displayed]

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