The “Correspondence Can’t Be Causal” section was unconvincing. The Ptolemaic model made advance predictions about astronomy that were experimentally falsified, leading to general acceptance of the Copernican system a millennium later. Models correspond to reality when the predictions they make are experimentally verified.
Regarding multi-model pragmatism, I get the feeling that you are not really arguing in the spirit of the original request for steel-manning. Due to my physics- and chemistry-laboratory training I have direct personally observed evidence that quantum mechanics and Einsteinium relativity are better descriptions of reality—correspond more accurately—than Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. Yet I pragmatically choose to use classical models on a day to day basis. Because if one model corresponds better than another, it does not replace the old model. The old model still corresponds with reality, just perhaps not as precisely as once thought. The decision of what model to choose when making predictions depends on how accurately those models reflect reality within the problem domain, how efficient the model is to compute, and how much error can be tolerated. Pragmatism and correspondence are related but different issues.
Models correspond to reality when the predictions they make are experimentally verified.
It’s a lot more complex than that. For one thing, verification of predicted observation sis never final—there is always room for extra accuracy.
Worse that, that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don’t exist.
Worse than that, ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities—one can’t assume one is incrementally approaching a realistic model just on the basis that a series of models has incrementally improving predictive power. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don’t know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that
better theories are more probably correc than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether
current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
The “Correspondence Can’t Be Causal” section was unconvincing. The Ptolemaic model made advance predictions about astronomy that were experimentally falsified, leading to general acceptance of the Copernican system a millennium later. Models correspond to reality when the predictions they make are experimentally verified.
Regarding multi-model pragmatism, I get the feeling that you are not really arguing in the spirit of the original request for steel-manning. Due to my physics- and chemistry-laboratory training I have direct personally observed evidence that quantum mechanics and Einsteinium relativity are better descriptions of reality—correspond more accurately—than Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. Yet I pragmatically choose to use classical models on a day to day basis. Because if one model corresponds better than another, it does not replace the old model. The old model still corresponds with reality, just perhaps not as precisely as once thought. The decision of what model to choose when making predictions depends on how accurately those models reflect reality within the problem domain, how efficient the model is to compute, and how much error can be tolerated. Pragmatism and correspondence are related but different issues.
It’s a lot more complex than that. For one thing, verification of predicted observation sis never final—there is always room for extra accuracy.
Worse that, that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate. For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don’t exist.
Worse than that, ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities—one can’t assume one is incrementally approaching a realistic model just on the basis that a series of models has incrementally improving predictive power. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don’t know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that better theories are more probably correc than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.