Sigma Club

Margherita Harris (LSE): “Model Robustness: Schupbach’s Explanatory Account of Robustness Analysis to the Rescue?”

In science, obtaining a “robust” result is often seen as providing further support for a hypothesis. The Bayesian should have something to say about the logic underpinning this method of confirmation. Schupbach’s recent explanatory account (2018) of robustness analysis (RA) is a welcome attempt […]

 
James Wills (LSE): “Classical Particle Indistinguishability, Precisely.”

I present an analysis of classical particle indistinguishability as ‘observational indistinguishability’ in a certain mathematically precise sense. I will argue that this leads to three interesting and welcome consequences in the foundations of statistical mechanics: (1) The identification and resolution of shortcomings in the ongoing debate concerning the solution to the […]

Emily Adlam (Cambridge): “Generalized Probabilistic Theories as Structural Realism”

In the field of quantum foundations there is a thriving research programme which involves placing quantum mechanics in a wider space of operationally defined theories in order to gain insight into its structure. There are various existing philosophical analyses of this research framework, but most have a strongly instrumentalist […]

Neil Dewar (Munich): “On Absolute Units”

What is the best way to characterise the intrinsic structure of physical quantities? Field’s program shows one approach (that also delivers a nominalist treatment of such quantities); in this talk, I outline how group-theoretic methods can deliver a somewhat simpler, although non-nominalist, way of doing this for scalar and vector quantities. I […]

Henrique Gomes & Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge): “Geometrodynamics as Functionalism about Time”

A recent literature about a doctrine called ‘spacetime functionalism’ focuses on how the physics of matter and radiation contributes to determining, or perhaps even determines or explains, chrono-geometry. Thus spacetime functionalism is closely related to relational, and specifically Machian, approaches to chrono-geometry and dynamics; and to what […]