That is, it would appear that any mathematical description can answer all
hypothetical questions correctly only if it has embedded within it (explicitly
or implicitly) a description of causes and their operations. Because those are
all their properties, they ought to tell us everything about how they can act
and interact, but we still would not know about the existence or the strength of
any gravitational attraction. I would then ask whether the equation can also Continuants (Substances)
Which Endure Through Change? what particular objects or particles might do
if put in new situations? If it cannot, then it clearly falls short of the tasks
physicists set themselves, and it would be useless for planning in engineering.
But since these structural patterns only have significance in conjunction with
the field equations, and because this conjunction results in true dispositions,
the theory is not incompatible with reality of dispositions. That is, matter can
be regarded as infiuencing the dispositions of objects to move in straight or
curved paths. But if we are not satisfied with a purely instrumentalist account
of scientific theories, we can still ask what is it about the physical world
that makes this theory a correct description? Why does Online Casino - Online
Poker differential equation correctly predict the world? Perhaps because it
describes correctly the time evolution of dispositions such Online Casino - Play
Poker forces, potentials, or quantum wave functions, in which case it can be
construed as a good description of these real dispositions. Perhaps, however, it
cannot be simply interpreted in this way, yet still gives good predictions of
what actually happens. For now general relativity describes how the mass-energy
tensor causes spacetime curvature, and the curvature itself in turn describes
how objects would move in spacetime if they were present. Geometrodynamics
(assuming the theory can be worked demarcate in adequate detail) has a similar
thick sandwich time-dependent interpretation, but is different from general
relativity in that now physical objects are not in spacetime (as we have always
imagined), but simply are regions of spacetime with certain patterns of
curvature. But this means that implicit in the non-linear field equations are
rules for determining how a given pattern of curvature would interact Descartes And
Leibniz various circumstances, on the basis of its nature as a pattern.