Einstein’s Theory of Theories and Mechanicism

ABSTRACT

One of the most important contributions of Einstein to the philosophy of science is the distinction between two types of scientific theories: ‘principle’ and ‘constructive’ theories. More recently, Flores proposed a more general distinction, classifying scientific theories by their functional role into ‘framework’ and ‘interaction’ theories, attempting to solve some inadequacies in Einstein’s proposal. Here, based on an epistemic criterion, we present a generalised distinction which is an improvement over Flores approach. In this work (i) we evaluate the shortcomings related to Flores’s proposal, (ii) we present an epistemological criterion that opens the door for a more general classification of any scientific theory in all of the natural science into two distinct groups, which we call ‘mechanistic theories’ and ‘structural theories’, and (iii) we show that such a criterion is connected to Flores’ proposal while overcoming issues of all previous approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory classification
• scientific explanation
• mechanistic explanations
• structural explanations
• philosophy of science

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Flores words: ‘ … all principle theories are framework theories and vice versa; all constructive theories are interaction theories but not vice versa. Thus, Einstein's distinction is a ‘special case’ of the distinction I have introduced’. (Flores 1999, 129).

2 An example of this can be found in (Romero-Maltrana, Benitez, and Soto 2018), where an argument based on the framework/interaction distinction is put forward, favouring particles over fields as the fundamental objects in nature.

3 See Russo and Williamson (2007), Williamson (2011), Russo and Williamson (2011), Psillos and Ioannidis (2019) for more details on the debates around the mechanistic and difference-making approaches.

4 Remember that Salmon's conception of mechanism is more stringent than ours.

5 There are people that prefer to talk about activities instead of interactions (see Machamer, Darden, and Craver 2000), however, they define activities as ‘the producer of change’, which is precisely what we have in mind when talking about interactions. Briefly, objects are detected because they interact with detectors, changing the state of the detector to some degree. In this fundamental sense, interactions are the producers of observable change.

6 Note, however, that if the law inside the nomological model corresponds to an interaction law, then it provides bottom-up explanations.

7 In the philosophical literature we also find the pragmatic theories of explanation, which incorporate some additional elements such as certain psychological characteristics (e.g., interests or beliefs) of the rational agents involved in the explanations, and the context in which the explanation is made. We affirm that even explanations of this type can be categorised as top-down or bottom-up, since pragmatic explanations maintain the structure of traditional explanations while adding some psychological elements such as those mentioned above.

8 Flores explicitly claims: ‘ … from the physical principles that constitute a framework theory one can only derive other laws which must be satisfied by all physical processes.’ (…) ‘whenever one has a result that applies to any physical process whatsoever, one should look for a derivation at the level of the framework theory’ (Flores 1999, 132–133, emphasis in the original).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONICET; Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.