Forces

Abstract

Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else.But forces, so conceived, appear to be occult. They are mysterious, because we have no clear conception of what they are, as opposed to what they are postulated to do; and they seem to be hidden from direct observations. There is, therefore, strong initial motivation for trying to eliminate forces from physics. Furthermore, as we shall explain, powerful arguments can be mounted to show that theories with forces can always be recast as theories without them. Hence it seems that forces should be eliminated, in the interests of simplicity.We argue, however, that forces should not be eliminated—just differently construed. For the effect of elimination is to leave us without any adequate account of the causal relationships forces were postulated to explain. And this would remain the case, even if forces could be identified with some merely dispositional properties of physical systems. In our view, forces are species of the causal relation itself, and as such have a different ontological status from the sorts of entities normally considered to be related as causes to effects.

In the light of time

“…Contemporary attempts, just as earlier ones, to give a philosophically satisfactory analysis of causation in physical settings (Castañeda 1980;Bigelow et al 1988;Heathcote 1989;Dowe 2000) rely on the conserved formalism that implies deterministic causal courses. The present study follows the same mechanistic tenet by stating that energy gradients are causes and energy flows are effects but perhaps paradoxically provides causation in the form of nondeterministic equation of motion.…”

20 Dynamics and the Perception of Causal Events

“…Rather, it associates causation with a pattern of forces and a position vector that indicates an endstate. Previous researchers have suggested that causation is closely linked to the notion of force (Ahn & Kalish, 2000, Bigelow et al, 1988Leslie, 1994). In particular, Bigelow & Pargetter (1990) proposed that causation might be associated with a specific pattern of several forces, though they did not specify the exact pattern.…”

Hic Rhodos, Hic Salta: From Reductionist Semantics to a Realist Ontology of Forceful Dispositions

“…Luckily, there is a growing community of philosophers who defend forces against reduction: for example, Bigelow, Ellis, and Pargetter in "Forces" (Bigelow et al 1988) and, very recently, Jessica Wilson in "Newtonian Forces" (Wilson forthcoming in BJPS). There is no space to present their arguments here but I hope that they can rescue forces from phlogiston's fate.…”