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Does Temperature Have a Metric Structure?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Bradford Skow
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Abstract

Is there anything more to temperature than the ordering of things from colder to hotter? Are there also facts, for example, about how much hotter (twice as hot, three times as hot, etc.) one thing is than another? There certainly are, but the only strong justification for this claim comes from statistical mechanics. What we knew about temperature before the advent of statistical mechanics (what we knew about it from thermodynamics) provided only weak reasons to believe it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 472 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Thanks to an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

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