To What Physics Corresponds

Abstract

In what follows I wish to reconsider certain ideas to be found in Post’s (1971) defence of the ‘retentionist’ or ‘accumulativist’ view of science. In particular I shall focus on heuristics and methodology and will confine the discussion to physics, specifically to theories of dynamics (this, I hazard, is to be counted a constraint in principle: it seems unlikely that similar considerations will apply to any other branch of empirical science). Post’s thesis (what he calls the “generalized principle of correspondence”) is both historical and methodological; it may be simply put as the claim that what is taken over from preceding theories is not only those laws and experimental facts which are well-confirmed, but also ‘patterns’ and ‘internal connections’, that in this way the successor theory accounts for whatever success its precursor enjoyed, for it “… will in fact embody a good deal of the (lower) theoretical structure of the [precursor] theory.” (1971, p. 229).