Correspondence as an intertheory relation (Q798642)

In the early stages of quantum mechanics, a widely accepted heuristic principle played a very important role. It says that a future theory has to be a generalization of a classical theory in the sense of yielding it as a special, or 'limiting', case. This principle, the so-called Correspondence Principle, is especially associated with Niels Bohr. Although it was originally stated for quantum mechanics, an analogous heuristic principle has also been important in the development of other branches of modern physics. Thus it is known, for instance, that Einstein used such a guide in the search for relativity theory. In this paper, we give the gist of our reconstructed notion of (limiting case) correspondence. Our notion is very general, and it should be applicable to all the cases in which a correspondence has been said to exist in actual science. We have elsewhere applied it to a couple of actual cases in physics.