“Inchoate Intuitions”: A Constructive Empiricist Analysis of Black Hole Dynamics and Entropy

This thesis maintains that scientific realist conceptions about science actively hamper the potential of modern physics to be useful and productive by encouraging a perception that science’s legitimacy is founded in giving us “truths” about the world, as well as leading physicists to do work that can’t ever be empirically grounded. To replace this realist bias, I seek to make the case that if physicists adopt Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism as a framework for understanding why they do science, they will recover more usefulness from their physics practice. I test this conception in case studies in still unresolved physics problems, focusing on the Page-time paradox and Maxwell’s Demon. I also make the case that physics itself often implies the superiority of constructive empiricism over realism, as well as make novel contributions to the constructive empiricist framework by extending van Fraassen’s understanding of epistemic communities and observability heuristic. This work starts and ends by discussing the Page-time paradox, initially introducing it as an example of the style of problem that has its roots in misplaced realist intuitions. The thesis takes the example of the Page-time paradox and ends by using constructive empiricism, along with my novel extensions outlined in the thesis, to present pathways via which a working physicist could solve or ignore the paradox in ways the realist couldn’t. By doing this, I state that the working physicist should adopt constructive empiricism to better allow them to do useful and productive work in physics.