Talk: Alyssa Ney (MCMP)

Title:

Assessing the Fundamentality of Physics through a Feminist Lens

Abstract:

That physics is fundamental is well-known to be the received view today in philosophy, and a guiding principle in many parts of science. The influence of this claim is far-reaching, from science policy to education; so much so, that it often goes unquestioned. Yet Nancy Cartwright (1999, 2022) has argued that no science, including physics, deserves the honorific ‘fundamental.’ Philosophers have engaged thoroughly with her famous epistemic arguments for this point. However, there has not so far been a serious evaluation of another line of argument in Cartwright’s work, that the claim that physics is fundamental is politically problematic. According to Cartwright: theories that purport to be fundamental – to be able in principle to explain everything of a certain kind – often gain additional credibility just for that reason itself. They get an extra dollop of support beyond anything that they have earned. (Cartwright 1999, p. 17)

In Cartwright’s view, allocations of support should be determined by facts about the research’s importance and intellectual merit, not by the degree to which the research is fundamental. That funding agencies and policymakers have allocated more funding to research claimed to be fundamental is well-supported by research in the social history of science funding (e.g. Solovey 2020). But is this politically problematic? Why exactly doesn’t physics’s fundamentality earn it a right to an extra “dollop of support”?

My aim will be to address this question through a feminist lens. Following bell hooks (1982), I understand feminism as “a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels – sex, race, and class, to name a few – and a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.” Cartwright’s argument could be read to suggest that the claim that physics is fundamental has no place in discussions of how to promote the self-development of people, global justice, and an end to suffering.

My primary goal here will be to sharpen an argument along these lines, to explain how the claim that physics is fundamental would most plausibly seem not to underwrite any claim to support. Ultimately, I do believe there is a connection between physics’s fundamentality and the potential of its research to improve the world. I recognize that defenses of reductionism or the fundamentality of physics have not traditionally been aligned with feminism. Claims of the fundamentality of physics and the case for more resources to physics are correctly seen as part of a broader culture of domination, and relatedly, war-mongering. I am interested, however, in how philosophers of physics can challenge this paradigm, by considering what can be said for the fundamentality of physics from a feminist and pacifist point of view. However, the first step is making the concerns as clear as possible.

References

Cartwright, Nancy. 2022. A Philosopher Looks at Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

hooks, bell. 1982. Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.

Solovey, Mark. 2020. Social Science for What? Battles Over Public Funding for the Other Sciences at the National Science Foundation. Cambridge: MIT Press.