More on Frisch

More puzzlement about something in Frisch’s book. On p. 17:

These is disagreement between those who think that the domains of applicability of all scientific theories are essentially limited and those who have a hierarchical conception of science according to which the ultimate aim of science is to discover some universal theory of everything. My claim that classical electrodynamics is (and to the best of our knowledge will remain) one of the core theories of physics is independent of that debate… For, first, we need to distinguish between the content of a theory and our attitude toward that content. Even if we took the content of classical electrodynamics to be given by universal claims with unrestricted scope about classical electromagnetic worlds, our attitude can be that we accept or endorse those claims only insofar as they concern phenomena within the theory’s domain of validity.

Unlike Frisch, I do not see the point (other than the obvious rhetorical one of avoiding terminological disputes) of distinguishing between the content of a theory and our attitude towards it. Under Frisch’s account, that part of the content of the theory that encompasses claims about what the entire universe is like is irrelevant to our knowledge of the physical world, because we accept only claims of the theory that fall within the theory’s domain of validity. What, then, is the purpose of attributing these useless claims, which have no bearing on our knowledge of the world, to the content of the theory?

It may sound here like I am just arguing about terminology, but I do think this particular use of language, which is deeply entrenched in philosophy of physics, is pernicious. It is pernicious because by elevating some particular construal of the mathematical structure of the theory to be straightforwardly “the content” of the theory, one is led to an overemphasis on the mathematical structure as being informative about the world, while overlooking the informativeness inherent in how that structure fails to perfectly map onto the world. This terminology in effect provides a licence to focus solely on formal features of the mathematical structure as being the “essence” of the theory without seriously considering how the structure hooks on to the actual world, as opposed to how it hooks on to the philosopher’s possible worlds.

Frisch on reliable theories

There’s a really confusing passage in p. 42 of Mathias Frisch’s book on inconsistency in classical electrodynamics. He suggests, in response to the “problem” of inconsistency in classical electrodynamics, that we modify our account of theory acceptance:

this problem disappears if in accepting a theory, we are committed to something weaker than the truth of the theory’s empirical consequences. I want to suggest that in accepting a theory, our commitment is only that the theory allows us to construct successful models of the phenomena in its domain, where part of what it is for a model to be successful is that it represents the phenomenon at issue to whatever degree of accuracy is appropriate in the case at issue. That is, in accepting a theory we are committed to the claim that the theory is reliable, but we are not committed to its literal truth or even just of its empirical consequences. This does not mean that we have to be instrumentalists. Our commitment might also extend to the ontology or the ‘mechanisms’ postulated by the theory. Thus, a scientific realist might be committed to the reality of electrons and of the electromagnetic field, yet demand only that electromagnetic models represent the behavior of these ‘unobservables’ reliably, while an empiricist could be content with the fact that the models are reliable as far as the theory’s observable consequences are concerned.

If acceptance involves only a commitment to the reliability of a theory, then accepting an inconsistent theory can be compatible with our standards of rationality, as long as inconsistent consequences of the theory agree approximately and to the appropriate degree of accuracy… our commitment can extend to mutually inconsistent subsets of a theory as long as predictions based on mutually inconsistent subsets agree approximately.*

What confuses me about this is that I do not know what Frisch could mean by a theory being reliable apart from its consistently producing predictions that agree with experiment. Frisch wants to avoid instrumentalism by claiming that in accepting a theory, all we are committed not just to the observable consequences of the theory, but also possibly to the reality of the ontology and mechanisms of the theory. That is, in accepting the theory of electrodynamics, we might also be committed to the claim that electromagnetic models represent the behavior of ‘unobservables’ like ontology and mechanisms reliably. But what does it mean to represent reliably, apart from being a representation that reliably leads to predictions that agree with experiment? What does Frisch mean in the excerpt above by “represents the phenomenon at issue to whatever degree of accuracy is appropriate”? How can degrees of accuracy be attributed to representations over and above the accuracy of their experimental predictions?

Incidentally, I’m appalled at how expensive Frisch’s book is now. I bought it for $9 on Amazon when OUP slashed prices after having decided to stop printing it. Now it costs $60. The Kindle Edition costs $53.72!

* Frisch, M. (2005). Inconsistency, Asymmetry, and Non-Locality: A Philosophical Investigation of ClassicalElectrodynamics. Oxford University Press, USA.