Abstract
I defend the idea that the fact that no system is entirely isolated (“Interventionism”) can be used to explain the successful use of the microcanonical distribution in statistical mechanics. The argument turns on claims about what is needed for an adequate explanation of this fact: I argue in particular that various competing explanations do not meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, and that the most striking lacuna in Interventionism—its failure to explain the “arrow of time”—is no real defect.
Highlights
In the last chapter of Time and Chance [1] David Albert presents his well-knownGRW-based approach to statistical mechanics
It is an idea that has been in the literature at least since Boltzmann, and has had and notable supporters: the reader is likely to have heard of Borel’s calculation of the effect on a gas on Earth of moving a gram of Entropy 2012, 14 matter on Sirius; more recently, Michael Redhead and Katinka Ridderbos [3] have advanced a version of Interventionism, and John Earman [4] has indicated some sympathy with the view
It seems to me that virtually all the philosophical issues concerning the foundations of statistical mechanics have to do with different conceptions of what we need to explain, and what would count as explaining it; for this reason, what can seem like a fatal objection to a particular approach, given particular expectations about what we should be trying to explain, might turn out to be no objection at all, given other conceptions of our explanatory task
Summary
In the last chapter of Time and Chance [1] David Albert presents his well-known. It seems to me that virtually all the philosophical issues concerning the foundations of statistical mechanics have to do with different conceptions of what we need to explain, and what would count as explaining it; for this reason, what can seem like a fatal objection to a particular approach, given particular expectations about what we should be trying to explain, might turn out to be no objection at all, given other conceptions of our explanatory task. This is the case, I believe, with Interventionism. What I am hoping to do is to raise considerations which tend to tell in favor of one conception, and against the others
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