At various points, I have been accused of treating too harshly with Abstractions, in saying that every level of abstraction is a level further away from reality, such that e.g. pure math is the most unreal of all.
I have also been accused (gasp!) of actually relying on abstractions, even though I grade them as unreal.
To the latter, I readily agree: I am with the quasi-realists in saying that we don't have a choice. My degradation of the abstract is for my own purposes, for mental hygiene, which leads to the first accusation, and an answer to it:

Keeping in mind that abstractions are less real than the data is was derived from can help us notice whem very competent people make very silly mistakes.

Case in point: Physicists waxing poetic about how if some constant were just a little different [scrreeeech] let me stop you right there!

Reality doesn't have constants.
Constants are numbers (often with units attached) that we stick into our formulae to make them work.

But the formulae are not reality.
We have absolutely no reason to think reality has constants.

Hence, the only way a constant could be different would be if reality was different (this happens a lot: reality turns out to be slightly different from what was previously believed, thereby correcting a constant ever so slightly).

Reality itself, we find again and again, doesn't change.
Every day we notice that, yeah, still the same.
Because to all intents and purposes it seems to just be spontaneously trundling along the only way it can.

The map is not the territory. Physics is not reality. Reality is not made of math, just because physics is.

Mental floss, see?

#mentalhygiene #physics #philosophy #philosophyofscience

My brother Finn Dellsén is speaking in #Camebridge today

Abduction: The Glory and Scandal of Philosophy?

Abstract

https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/msc-abstracts

C.D. Broad referred to inductive reasoning as "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy“. Broad‘s point was that while scientists routinely use various forms of inductive reasoning, philosophers have not yet provided any convincing justification for doing so. I suggest that an analogous claim is true of abductive reasoning in philosophy: while philosophers routinely use abductive reasoning, e.g. Inference to the Best Explanation, we philosophers have not yet provided any convincing justification for doing so. In particular, I discuss four problems that arise for abductive reasoning in philosophy: (i) all available explanatory hypotheses may be false; (ii) there may be multiple similarly-plausible rival explanations which undermine each other; (iii) the ‘evidence’ to be explained may be false or uncertain; and (iv) we may have no way to estimate whether the ‘explanatory virtues’ are truth-conducive. In response to these problems, I argue that we should reconceive of the structure of abductive reasoning in philosophy so that, in most cases, it licenses a substantially more modest type of conclusion than it has previously been thought to do.

---

Abductive reasoning on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Abductive reasoning allows inferring a as an explanation of b. As a result of this inference, abduction allows the precondition a to be abducted from the consequence b. Deductive reasoning and abductive reasoning thus differ in which end, left or right, of the proposition " a entails b" serves as conclusion. For example, in a billiard game, after glancing and seeing the eight ball moving towards us, we may abduce that the cue ball struck the eight ball. The strike of the cue ball would account for the movement of the eight ball. It serves as a hypothesis that explains our observation. Given the many possible explanations for the movement of the eight ball, our abduction does not leave us certain that the cue ball in fact struck the eight ball, but our abduction, still useful, can serve to orient us in our surroundings. Despite many possible explanations for any physical process that we observe, we tend to abduce a single explanation (or a few explanations) for this process in the expectation that we can better orient ourselves in our surroundings and disregard some possibilities.

#philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #science #AbductiveReasoning

Sabine Hossenfelder:

Does Superdeterminism save Quantum Mechanics? Or does it kill free will and destroy science?

https://youtu.be/ytyjgIyegDI

#SabineHossenfelder #science #physics #FoundationsOfPhysics #QuantumMechanics #determinism #PhilosophyOfScience

Physics isn't pretty | Sabine Hossenfelder

https://youtu.be/OFZpo9IyjqA

@8:57 The science writer Jim Baggott suggests to call this "metaphysical commitment" instead of arguments from beauty

#SabineHossenfelder #science #physics #FoundationsOfPhysics #philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #MetaphysicalCommitment