[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Marco Giovanelli (23 April on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

On Friday, 23 April, Marco Giovanelli (University of Turin) will give a
talk entitled “Special Relativity as a Theory of Principles. Reflections On
Einstein’s Distinction between Constructive and Principle Theories”
(abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CEST). If you have
not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to
antonio.vassallo at pw.edu.pl.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group at the
International Center for Formal Ontology (Faculty of Administration and
Social Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology).

The program for the summer semester can be found here
<https://ssqg.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/index.php/warsaw-spacetime-colloquium-2020-2021-online/>,
while the recordings of the previous meetings are available on the
ICFO's YouTube
channel
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-1yNCyvJJAfiq7LDFjfYc1I5OOxhJ1A>.

ABSTRACT
In a 1919 article for the Times of London, Einstein declared relativity
theory to be a ‘principle theory,’ like thermodynamics, rather than a
‘constructive theory,’ like the kinetic theory of gases. Over the last
decades, Einstein’s distinction has attracted considerable attention.
Philosophers have often considered it as Einstein’s fundamental insight
into the nature of spacetime, historians as an unoriginal variation on the
19th-century theme. The paper argues that both stances grasp only part of
the truth. To understand Einstein’s “theories of theories” properly, one
has to disentangle the two threads of its fabric. Einstein introduced at
the same time (a) classification of existing theories (b) classification of
strategies for finding new theories. Unlike the usual physical theories,
special relativity, like thermodynamics, does not directly attempt to
construct models of specific physical systems; it provides empirically
motivated and mathematically formulated criteria for such theories’
acceptability. After his early success, Einstein became convinced that, in
general, instead of directly searching for new theories, it is often more
convenient to search for the formal conditions that constraint the number
of possible theories. It is indeed using this strategy that Einstein
achieved most of his successes. The paper concludes that these two aspects
of Einstein’s principles/constructive theories distinction are best framed
by resorting to the opposition between ‘byproducts’ and ‘constraints’
(Lange). For Lorentz and Poincaré, the Lorentz-transformations were a
by-product of the actual laws governing fields and matter, as a feature
that they happen to satisfy. Einstein elevated such coincidence into a
constraint, a requirement that all possible laws of nature must satisfy.
>From this perspective, the relativity principle is not a categorical
statement about the real but a modal statement about the possible. In this
sense, the paper will defend the characterization as special relativity as
a “principle theory”—providing general constraints on laws or theories of
whatever nature—rather than as constructive theory—either about the
material structure of rods and clocks (Brown) or about the geometrical
structure of spacetime (Janssen).
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