Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Super-Humeanism and physics: A merry relationship?

  • Humeanisms
  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Humeanism started life as a metaphysical program that could turn out to be false if our best physical theories were to postulate ontological features at odds with Humean ones. However, even if this has arguably already happened, Humeanism is still considered one of the strongest and most appealing metaphysical theories for describing the physical world. What is even more surprising is that a radical Humean thesis—Super-Humeanism—which posits an extremely parsimonious ontology including nothing more than propertyless matter points and their distance relations, is said by its proponents to follow from an attentive reading of our best physical theories. Given its close relationship with physics, Super-Humeans argue that their doctrine (i) conforms to Scientific Realism, (ii) offers the ontology that best explains physics’ empirical evidence, and (iii) is a naturalistic theory. This paper investigates the strategies that Super-Humeans have adopted to defend these three claims and, more generally, its alleged closeness to physics. I will show that, contrary to what advocates of Super-Humeanism claim, some of its commitments have inevitably created a gap between itself and physics that is difficult to overcome. While it is laudable that Super-Humeans have adopted various strategies to close this gap, no strategy has yet fully succeeded.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For a discussion of the compatibility between Humeanism and Quantum Gravity, see Wüthrich (2019), Matarese (2019) and Esfeld (2020c).

  2. See, for instance, how Lewis suggests revisiting his definition of intrinsic properties in order to accommodate vectors as fundamental properties of the Humean mosaic (Lewis 1994, p. 474). A second example comes from the existence of a fundamentally probabilistic world, which certain interpretations of quantum mechanics seem to imply. In this case, Lewis takes great pains to show how chance fits with his thesis of Humean Supervenience, and he even considers that this problem may constitute a fatal blow to his whole project (Lewis 1994). Therefore, it seems to me that Lewis himself still takes his doctrine literally and finds it meaningful to engage in discussions about physics.

  3. To see why it seems extremely hard to reduce entanglement relations to intrinsic properties of particles, see Maudlin (2007).

  4. See Darby (2012), who proposes to add entanglement relations to the mosaic.

  5. See, for instance, Callender (2015), Esfeld (2014), Huggett (2006) and Miller (2014).

  6. For instance, in the case of entanglement, an option for Humeans, which was proposed in Loewer (1996), would be to endorse 3N-fundamentalism and consider the configuration space as the arena of the Humean mosaic, upon which all else (including entanglement relations) supervenes. However, this solution certainly faces problems, not only because, strictly speaking, it would violate the Humean thesis according to which spacetime and our spatiotemporal relations (and not some sort of spacetime-like arena or spatiotemporal-like relations) are fundamental, but, more importantly, because it is very controversial to consider the configuration space, which is essentially a mathematical space, as a physical space. For this reason, many Humeans regard this option as the very last resort one should appeal to. See Esfeld (2014).

  7. See Sect. 2 for an explanation of the Best System account.

  8. One notable exception is Belot (2011). For current criticisms of this strategy, see Dewar (2018)‚ Lazarovici (2018)‚ Matarese (2018) and Simpson (2019).

  9. See, for instance, Esfeld (2014), Miller (2014), Hubert (2016). ‘Humean strategies’ are applied even in non-Humean papers: see Vassallo and Esfeld (2016).

  10. In this paper, the name ‘Super-Humeanism’ is used specifically for the view developed in Esfeld (2020a, b), and in Esfeld and Deckert (2018). This label, however, could also be used more broadly, so as to include Huggett’s relational account, which is not committed to a particle ontology like Esfeld’s Super-Humeanism.

  11. Borrowing Super-Humean terminology, we will use ‘matter points’ (a more technical term) and ‘particles’ (a looser term) interchangeably.

  12. For a discussion of this kind of argument, see Dewar (2018).

  13. Here Lewis proposes an even more direct relation between physics and perfectly natural properties: “Thus the business of physics is not just to discover laws […], physics proposes inventories of the natural properties instantiated in our world” (Lewis 1983, p. 364).

  14. See, for instance, the following: “Physics has its short list of 'fundamental physical properties': the charges and masses of particles, also their so-called 'spins' and 'colours' and 'flavours', and maybe a few more that have yet to be discovered” (Lewis 1986, p. 60).

  15. According to Loewer’s (2007) account of Humean laws of nature, on the contrary, physics tells us what is scientifically—and not metaphysically—fundamental, by giving us fundamental laws that employ scientifically fundamental predicates. Yet even within this Humean view, physics guides us to what is fundamental in the world.

  16. See, for instance, Esfeld (2014) when he talks about the wave function.

  17. I would like to thank an anonymous referee of this special issue for guiding me in interpreting this passage correctly.

  18. While Lewis (1986) argues for metaphysical fundamentality, Loewer (2007) prefers scientific fundamentality.

  19. I will address the problematic ontological status of these properties in the next section.

  20. Unfortunately, there is no metaphysical clarification on this in the works by Esfeld and his collaborators. So, it is difficult to reconstruct a faithful and honest interpretation of their view on this. What I understand is that Esfeld considers ontological status and nomological status to be two mutually exclusive alternatives. In this context, the nomological status attributed to supervenient entities like mass indicates that there is no physical property ‘mass’ which is independent of particle trajectories. Moreover, the supervenience relation is understood as a strong reductive relation.

  21. For this claim, I am very much indebted to Dan Marshall.

  22. For a clarification of Scientific Realism, see Chakravartty (2017).

  23. See the following by Chakravartty (2017): “Semantically, realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world. In common parlance, realists take theoretical statements at ‘face value’”.

  24. Many Super-Humeans refer to Bell, who famously wrote, concerning the double slit experiment: “Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle?” (Bell 1987, p. 191).

  25. See Esfeld and Deckert (2018), where they show that “the predictions of the Standard Model in the electron sector for cut-offs and neglect of radiation arise naturally from a Bohmian quantum field theory.” (Esfeld and Deckert 2018, p. 128).

  26. For an explanation of the identity-based Bohmian guiding equation and a comparison with the standard one, see Goldstein et al. (2005) and Esfeld et al. (2017b).

References

  • Allori, V. (2013). Primitive ontology and the structure of fundamental physical theories. In The wave function: Essays on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, pp. 58–75.

  • Allori, V., Goldstein, S., Tumulka, R., & Zanghì, N. (2014). Predictions and primitive ontology in quantum foundations: A study of examples. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65(2), 323–352.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bell, J. S. (1987). Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Belot, G. (2011). Geometric possibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bhogal, H., & Perry, Z. (2015). What the Humean should say about entanglement. Noûs, 5(1), 74–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callender, C. (2015). One world, one beable. Synthese, 192(10), 3153–3177.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chakravartty, A. (2017). Scientific realism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2017 ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/.

  • Darby, G. (2012). Relational holism and Humean supervenience. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63(4), 773–788.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deckert, D. A., Esfeld, M., & Oldofredi, A. (2019). A persistent particle ontology for quantum field theory in terms of the Dirac sea. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 70(3), 747–770.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dewar, N. (2018). La bohume. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1800-1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dürr, D., et al. (2013). Quantum physics without quantum philosophy. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2014). Quantum Humeanism, or: Physicalism without properties. The Philosophical Quarterly, 64(256), 453–470.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2018a). Super-Humeanism: The Canberra plan for physics, forthcoming. In Anna Marmodoro (Ed.), The foundation of reality: Fundamentality, space and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2018b). Metaphysics of science as naturalized metaphysics. In Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay, & Mikaël Cozic (Eds.), The philosophy of science. A companion (pp. 142–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2020a). A proposal for a minimalist ontology. Synthese, 197, 1889–1905.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2020b). Science and human freedom. Basel: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature Switzerland.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M. (2020c). Against the disappearance of spacetime in quantum gravity. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02168-y.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M., & Deckert, D. (2018). A minimalist ontology of the natural world. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M., Deckert, D., & Oldofredi, A. (2017a). What is matter? The fundamental ontology of atomism and structural realism. In A. Ijjas & B. Loewer (Eds.), A guide to the philosophy of cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M., & Lam, V. (2011). Ontic structural realism as a metaphysics of objects. In Alisa & P. Bokulich (Eds.), Scientific structuralism (pp. 143–159). Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esfeld, M., Lazarovici, D., Lam, V., & Hubert, M. (2017b). The physics and metaphysics of primitive stuff. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 68(1), 133–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldstein, S., Taylor, J., Tumulka, R., & Zanghì, N. (2005). Are all particles identical? Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General, 38(7), 1567.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodman, N. (1954). Fact, fiction, and forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hubert, M. (2016). Particles and laws of nature in classical and quantum physics. Doctoral dissertation, https://serval.unil.ch/notice/serval:BIB_DCCBD627C57C.

  • Huggett, N. (2006). The regularity account of relational spacetime. Mind, 115(457), 41–73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ladyman, J., Ross, D., Collier, J., & Spurrett, D. (2007). Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Laudan, L. (1981). A confutation of convergent realism. Philosophy of Science, 48, 19–48.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lazarovici, D. (2018). Super-Humeanism: A starving ontology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 64, 79–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lazarovici, D. (2020). Position measurements and the empirical status of particles in Bohmian Mechanics. Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/709412.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. (1983). New work for a theory of universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61, 343–377.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. (1986). Philosophical papers (Vol. II). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. (1994). Humean supervenience debugged. Mind, 103(412), 473–490.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Loewer, B. (1996). Humean supervenience. Philosophical Topics, 24(1), 101–127.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Loewer, B. (2007). Laws and natural properties. Philosophical Topics, 35(1/2), 313–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matarese, V. (2018). A challenge for Super-Humeanism: The problem of immanent comparisons. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01914-y.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matarese, V. (2019). Loop quantum gravity: A new threat to Humeanism? Part I: The problem of spacetime. Foundations of Physics, 49(3), 232–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maudlin, T. (1997). Descrying the world in the wave function. The Monist, 80(1), 3–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maudlin, T. (2007). The metaphysics within physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Maudlin, T. (2013). The nature of the quantum state. In A. Ney & D. Albert (Eds.), The wave function: Essays on the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, pp. 126–53.

  • Miller, E. (2014). Quantum entanglement, Bohmian mechanics, and Humean supervenience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), 567–583.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simpson, W. M. (2019). What’s the matter with Super-Humeanism? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz028.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vassallo, A., Deckert, D., & Esfeld, M. (2017). Relationalism about mechanics based on a minimalist ontology of matter. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 7, 299–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vassallo, A., & Esfeld, M. (2016). Leibnizian relationalism for general relativistic physics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 55, 101–107.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vassallo, A., & Ip, P. (2016). On the conceptual issues surrounding the notion of relational Bohmian dynamics. Foundations of Physics, 46(8), 943–972.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wallace, D. (2018). Lessons from realistic physics for the metaphysics of quantum theory. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1706-y.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, A. (2018). Super-Humeanism: Insufficiently naturalistic and insufficiently explanatory. Metascience, 27(3), 427–431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wüthrich, C. (2019). When the actual world is not even possible. In G. Darby, D. Glick, & A. Marmodoro (Eds.), The foundation of reality: Fundamentality, space and time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Dan Marshall for many enlightening and rigorous conversations on Humeanism and Super-Humeanism. I also would like to thank my anonymous referees for very insightful comments and the editor of this special issue, László Kocsis, for his kind assistance. Funding for this project was initially provided by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (grant Formal Epistemology – the Future Synthesis, in the framework of the program Praemium Academicum) and later by the Center for Space and Habitability of the University of Bern.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Space and Habitability and Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, Gesellschaftsstrasse 6, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Vera Matarese

  2. Institute of Philosophy, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Vera Matarese

Authors
  1. Vera Matarese
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vera Matarese.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Matarese, V. Super-Humeanism and physics: A merry relationship?. Synthese 199, 791–813 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02717-w

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02717-w

Keywords

Search

Navigation