Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics : Essays in Honour of Heinz Post

This volume is presented in honour of Heinz Post, who founded a distinc­ tive and distinguished school of philosophy of science at Chelsea College, University of London. The 'Chelsea tradition' in philosophy of science takes the content of science seriously, as exemplified by the papers presented here. The unifying theme of this work is that of 'Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics', after the title of a classic and seminal paper by Heinz Post, published in 1971, which is reproduced in this volume with the kind permission of the editors and publishers of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Described by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method as "brilliant" and " . . . a partial antidote against the view which I try to defend" (1975, p. 61, fn. 17), this paper, peppered with illustrative examples from the history of science, brings to the fore some of Heinz Post's central concerns: the heuristic criteria used by scientists in constructing their theories, the intertheoretic relationships which these criteria reflect and, in particular, the nature of the correspondence that holds between a theory and its predecessors (and its suc­ cessors). The appearance of this volume more than twenty years later is an indica­ tion of the fruitfulness of Post's contribution: philosophers of science continue to explore the issues raised in his 1971 paper. Front Matter....Pages i-xxiii Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics: In Praise of Conservative Induction....Pages 1-43 Correspondence and Reduction in Chemistry....Pages 45-64 Taking Antecedent Conditions Seriously: A Lesson in Heuristics from Biology....Pages 65-82 The Rise of the ‘Fifth Force’....Pages 83-103 Michael Faraday’s Thought: Discovery or Revelation?....Pages 105-124 Ideology, Heuristics and Rationality in the Context of Discovery....Pages 125-136 Towards an Acceptable Theory of Acceptance: Partial Structures Inconsistency and Correspondence....Pages 137-158 Tales from the Classroom: The See-Saw....Pages 159-169 The Unnatural Nature of the Laws of Nature: Symmetry and Asymmetry....Pages 171-187 Galilean Relativity and Galileo’s Relativity....Pages 189-205 Pragmatic Circles in Relativistic Time Keeping....Pages 207-225 Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics in the Emergence of Special Relativity....Pages 227-260 Underdetermination, Conventionalism and Realism: The Copenhagen vs. the Bohm Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics....Pages 261-278 Measurement and Quantum Silence....Pages 279-294 To What Physics Corresponds....Pages 295-325 Is the End of Physics in Sight?....Pages 327-341 Back Matter....Pages 343-363

This volume is dedicated to Heinz Post who proposed a rational model of scientific discovery. His account draws attention to the formal flaws in theories that motivate theory modification, the correspondence relations that hold between old and new theories and the cross-theoretic retention of symmetry and conservation principles.
Exploring Post's model from a variety of perspectives, the contributors draw on a wide range of case studies from physics, chemistry and biology. This is the first work to examine one such model of heuristics in the context of detailed examples from science itself. It will be of interest to teachers, researchers and graduate students in both the history and philosophy of science and can be used as a textbook in advanced courses on scientific method.