Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Thesis (Master's)
Department or Program
Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
Abstract
Many contemporary debates and distinctions in the philosophy of science stem from a methodological view that takes the project of metaphysics to be descriptive in nature. I argue that if one adopts an approach that looks at how we use and change our concepts instead several key implications follow. The first is that non-trivial conceptual continuity between theories is unavoidable. The second is that Identifying these continuities can help us determine how we ought to develop successive theories. My prime example for a candidate that merits this kind of continuous status are ghost fields in Quantum Field Theory (QFT). In QFT, ghosts are entities which are wholly unphysical, and therefore do not map onto any entities which can be measured, but are required to be instantiated in our theory to maintain internal consistency, allow it to make correct predictions, and to let us instantiate those entities which do map onto observables in the first place. Such entities are continuous since their removal constrains the predictive power of QFT. Once identified as continuous entities, I consider what their inclusion would look like in any future instantiation of the theory and argue that the more general class of gauge redundancies, of which the ghosts are a part, are a set of entities to which we should be epistemically committed to. This is contrasted with the modern scattering amplitudes program which, in recent decades, has pursued a line of development for QFT which involves a removal of such redundancies from the structure of the theory.
Recommended Citation
Singh, Kyle, "An Ideal Science" (2024). Dartmouth College Master’s Theses. 149.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/masters_theses/149