Abstract

Traditional arguments against or in favor of continuity rely upon the presupposition that sci- entific theories can serve as markers of descriptive truth. I argue that such a notion of the term is misguided if we are concerned with the question of how our scientific schemes ought to develop. Instead, a reconstruction of the term involves identifying those concepts which guide the develop- ment from one successive scheme to the next and labelling those concepts with the status that they are continuous. I explicitly construct an example of this kind of continuity utilizing two formula- tions of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and identify what persists from the standard formulation, beginning with an action, to the successive one, making use of spinor helicity variables. Three con- cepts persist which are responsible for supplying explicit constraints on our expressions which serve to match onto empirical predictions: Lorentz invariance, locality and unitarity. Further extensions of this kind of analysis to models beyond the physical sciences are proposed.