[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Robert DiSalle (5 November on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

On Friday, 5 November, Robert DiSalle (Western University) will give a talk
titled "On the epistemological foundations of space-time geometry"
(abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CET). If you have
not registered yet, you can do so here <https://forms.gle/qpb8vVjtrF4y2nZ76>
.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group
<https://ans.pw.edu.pl/Nauka/Zespoly-badawcze/Philosophy-of-Physics-Group>
at the Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences, Warsaw University of
Technology. The program for the winter semester can be found here
<https://ans.pw.edu.pl/Nauka/Zespoly-badawcze/Philosophy-of-Physics-Group/Events/Warsaw-Spacetime-Colloquium-2021-2022-online>
.

You can address any inquiry to antonio.vassallo at pw.edu.pl.

ABSTRACT
According to Einstein, what was central to the motivating arguments for the
general theory of relativity included not only the familiar arguments about
generalizing the relativity of motion, but also the more complicated
argument about the empirical content of space-time geometry. On this
matter, Einstein's views, broadly speaking, reflected the influence and
insight of Poincaré and Hilbert regarding the empirical interpretation of
formal structures. More specifically, however, Einstein offered a reductive
analysis of the empirical foundation of geometry, that is, the argument
reducing geometrical measurements to observations of "point-coincidences."
This reductive argument in turn inspired logical empiricist conceptions of
the empirical content of formal theories. This paper draws a sharp contrast
between such conception and the way in which the theory actually determines
its characteristic theoretical magnitudes, such as the curvature of
space-time.  It suggests that the reductive analysis ultimately obscures
the empirical significance of general relativity as a novel theory of
gravity and space-time, and the nature of the evidentiary basis for this
dramatic conceptual shift. I outline an alternative account of how general
relativity connects with spatial and temporal measurement, based in the
history of the epistemology of geometry, by extending historical analyses
of spatial measurement, and of the empirical character of non-Euclidean
geometry, to the analysis of curved space-time. This account suggests, more
generally, an account of scientific representation, and of the links
between empirical descriptions and mathematical structures, that avoids the
characteristic difficulties of standard recent approaches.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://listbox.elte.hu/mailman/private/philphys/attachments/20211101/c8db9f76/attachment.html>