Speaker: Bixin Guo (Assistant Professor, Macalester College)
Chair: Yan Chunling (Assistant Professor, Peking University)
Time: 15:00 - 17:00 p.m., Dec 20th, 2024, GMT+8
Venue: Room 109, Building 3, Lee Shau Kee Humanities Buildings, PKU
Language: English
Abstract:
Instead of assuming that we have a clear grasp of how thermodynamics is reduced to statistical mechanics and using that as a paradigmatic case to understand reduction, I propose to approach the problem from a different direction: I argue that there are two distinct approaches to understanding reduction: the ontology-first approach and the theory-first approach. They concern the relation between ontological reduction and inter-theoretic reduction. Further, I argue for the significance of this distinction by demonstrating that either one or the other approach has been taken as an implicit assumption in, and has in fact shaped, our understanding of what statistical mechanics is. More specifically, I argue that Boltzmannian statistical mechanics assumes and relies on the ontology-first approach, whereas Gibbsian statistical mechanics should assume the theory-first approach.
Source: Department of Philosophy
