Rosaler, Joshua (2015) Local Reduction in Physics. [Preprint]

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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 re- ductions 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 no- tion 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 under- written 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:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Rosaler, Joshua rosaler@post.harvard.edu
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Depositing User:	Dr. Joshua Rosaler
Date Deposited:	20 Mar 2015 13:24
Last Modified:	20 Mar 2015 13:24
Item ID:	11381
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism
Date:	19 March 2015
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11381

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