München 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik
AGPhil 3: Philosophy of Cosmology III
AGPhil 3.3: Vortrag
Dienstag, 19. März 2019, 12:15–12:45, HS 10
Interventionism Meets Cosmology — •Phil Dowe1 and Dayal Wickramasinghe2 for the Dowe and Wickramasinghe collaboration — 1School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia — 2Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Interventionism as an account of causal explanation and causal inference (Woodward 2003, Pearl 2000) is widely held to have been successful when applied to the special sciences. But it is also widely held that Interventionism doesn't apply on the cosmological scale because, among other reasons, at that scale no sense can be made of the idea of an intervention. We show that there is ample reason to think cosmology utilises causal inferences and furnishes causal explanations, and that attempts to extend the idea of an intervention at the cosmic scale are in some ways better placed to capture cosmic causal explanation than the main rival, Lewis' closest world semantics. To argue for this we consider the inflationary explanation of the expansion rates of the universe and the current acceleration, and the inflationary solution of Guth (1981) to the smoothness problem (horizon problem). In addition we illustrate how causal reasoning might clarify alleged epistemic limitations induced by cosmological horizons (particle and event horizons).