2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

PSA Abstracts
critique is based on a misunderstanding of the criteria for the definability of a
relation, a misunderstanding that Malement’s original treatment helped to foster.
There are in fact a variety of notions of definability that can be brought to
bear. They all, however, require a condition that suffices to secure Malament’s
result. The non-standard relation Sarkar and Stachel claim to be definable is
not so definable, and, I argue, their proposal to modify the notion of “causal
definability” is misguided. Finally, I address the relevance of Malament’s result
to the thesis of conventionalism.
Eric␣ R. Scerri University of California Los Angeles
The recently claimed observation of atomic orbitals and some related
philosophical issues
The main thrust of the paper concerns a theoretical and philosophical analysis
of the claim made in September 1999 that atomic orbitals have been directly
imaged for the first time. After a brief account of the recent claims the paper
reviews the development of the orbit and later orbital concepts and analyzes
the theoretical status of atomic orbitals. The conclusion is that contrary to
these claims, atomic orbitals have not in fact been observed. The non referring
nature of modern atomic orbitals is discussed in the context of Laudan’s writings
on realism, the success of theories and whether or not scientific terms refer. I
conclude that the failure to observe orbitals is a good prima facia case for
divorcing the success of theories from the question of whether their central
terms refer. The added relevance of this case is that it concerns a current and
highly successful theory.
P
S
A
Oliver Schulte University of Alberta
Inferring Conservation Principles in Particle Physics: A Case Study in
Reliable and Efficient Inquiry
This paper applies learning-theoretic analysis to an inductive problem that
arises in particle physics: how to infer from observed reactions conservation
principles that govern all reactions among elementary particles. I describe a
reliable inference procedure that is guaranteed to arrive at an empirically
adequate set of conservation principles as more and more evidence is gathered.
In certain circumstances, finding an empirically adequate conservation theory
requires positing hidden particles. The paper describes learning-theoretic
conceptions of empirical success in addition to reliable convergence to a correct
theory, which determine an essential unique optimal inductive procedure for
the particle dynamics problem.
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