The Importance of Observational Equivalence

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I have a project that's so sweet, is to start from the most basic formulation that I can imagine of the fundamental laws of physics and recover the manifest image from it. And what almost everyone does, physicists and philosophers, to me, is that they cheat. They know what the manifest image looks like. So they're just going to burden their ontology with ideas about laws of physics or space and what have you. But I really want to get those as effective emergent higher level approximate things and figure out why those are nevertheless useful to us. That's very interesting. Is that your way of saying that it's completely nuts? No, no, no,no. The idea that

Is metaphysics like physics, but cooler? Or is it a relic of an outdated, pre-empirical way of thinking about the world? Closer to the former than the latter. Rather than building specific quantitative theories about the world, metaphysics aims to get a handle on the basic logical structures that help us think about it. I talk with philosopher Katie Elliott on how metaphysics helps us think about questions like counterfactuals, possible worlds, time travel, mathematical equivalence, and whether everything happens for a reason.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/24/244-katie-elliott-on-metaphysics-chance-and-time/

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Katrina (Katie) Elliott received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After being an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA, she is now on the faculty at Brandeis. Her research covers topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, including explanation, chances, and the logic of time travel.

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