Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: Marco Giovanelli (23 April on Zoom)

On Friday, 23 April, Marco Giovanelli (University of Turin) will give a talk entitled “Special Relativity as a Theory of Principles. Reflections On Einstein’s Distinction between Constructive and Principle Theories” (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CEST). If you have not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group at the International Center for Formal Ontology (Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology).

ABSTRACT
In a 1919 article for the Times of London, Einstein declared relativity theory to be a ‘principle theory,’ like thermodynamics, rather than a ‘constructive theory,’ like the kinetic theory of gases. Over the last decades, Einstein’s distinction has attracted considerable attention. Philosophers have often considered it as Einstein’s fundamental insight into the nature of spacetime, historians as an unoriginal variation on the 19th-century theme. The paper argues that both stances grasp only part of the truth. To understand Einstein’s “theories of theories” properly, one has to disentangle the two threads of its fabric. Einstein introduced at the same time (a) classification of existing theories (b) classification of strategies for finding new theories. Unlike the usual physical theories, special relativity, like thermodynamics, does not directly attempt to construct models of specific physical systems; it provides empirically motivated and mathematically formulated criteria for such theories’ acceptability. After his early success, Einstein became convinced that, in general, instead of directly searching for new theories, it is often more convenient to search for the formal conditions that constraint the number of possible theories. It is indeed using this strategy that Einstein achieved most of his successes. The paper concludes that these two aspects of Einstein’s principles/constructive theories distinction are best framed by resorting to the opposition between ‘byproducts’ and ‘constraints’ (Lange). For Lorentz and Poincaré, the Lorentz-transformations were a by-product of the actual laws governing field and matter, as a feature that they happen to satisfy. Einstein elevated such coincidence into a constraint, a requirement that all possible laws of nature must satisfy. From this perspective, the relativity principle is not a categorical statement about the real but a modal statement about the possible. In this sense, the paper will defend the characterization as special relativity as a “principle theory”—providing general constraints on laws or theories of whatever nature—rather than as constructive theory—either about the material structure of rods and clocks (Brown) or about the geometrical structure of spacetime (Janssen).