Talk by Luigi Scorzato at MCMP (Wed. 16th Jan.)

[Karim Thebault]

Speaker: Luigi Scorzato (ECT*, Trento)

Wednesday January 16th
Ludwigstr.31 /II room 225
Time: 6 to 8 pm

Title:
The interplay between simplicity and measurability in scientific theories.

Abstract:
Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to
another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little
philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of
simplicity, and those that can be defined precisely strongly depend on
the language in which the theory is formulated. Moreover, according to
a common general argument, the simplicity of a theory is always
trivial in a suitably chosen language. However, this "trivialization
argument" is always either applied to toy-models of scientific
theories or applied with little regard for the empirical content of
the theory. In this paper I show that the trivialization argument
fails, when one considers realistic theories and requires their
empirical content to be preserved. In fact, the concepts that enable a
very simple formulation, are not necessarily measurable, in general.
Moreover, the inspection of a theory describing a chaotic billiard
shows that precisely those concepts that naturally make the theory
extremely simple are provably not measurable. This suggests that,
whenever a theory possesses sufficiently complex consequences, the
constraint of measurability prevents too simple formulations in any
language. In this paper I propose a way to introduce the constraint of
measurability in the formulation of a scientific theory in such a way
that the notion of simplicity acquires a general and sufficiently
precise meaning. I argue that this explains why the scientists often
regard their assessments of simplicity as largely unambiguous.
_______________________________________________
philphysmunich mailing list
philphysmunich at lists.lrz.de
https://lists.lrz.de/mailman/listinfo/philphysmunich