Worldly imprecision

Philosophical Studies 178 (9):2895-2911 (2020)
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Abstract

Physical theories often characterize their observables with real number precision. Many non-fundamental theories do so needlessly: they are more precise than they need to be to capture the physical matters of fact about their observables. A natural expectation is that a truly fundamental theory will require its full precision in order to exhaustively capture all of the fundamental physical matters of fact. I argue against this expectation and I show that we do not have good reason to expect that the standard of precision set by successful theories, or even by a truly fundamental theory, will match the granularity of the physical facts.

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Michael E. Miller
University of Toronto, St. George Campus

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References found in this work

The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science.Theodore Sider - 2020 - Oxford, England and New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
The metaphysics of quantity.Brent Mundy - 1987 - Philosophical Studies 51 (1):29 - 54.
Measurement in Science.Eran Tal - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Real Problem with Perturbative Quantum Field Theory.James D. Fraser - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):391-413.
Measurement Accuracy Realism.Paul Teller - 2018 - In The Experimental Side of Modeling,. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 273-298.

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