Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userSome Philosophical Prehistory of the (Earman-Norton) Hole Argument
46
0
0.0
(
0
)
Authors
James Owen Weatherall
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
The celu of the philosophical literature on the hole argument is the 1987 paper by Earman & Norton [What Price Space-time Substantivalism? The Hole Story Br. J. Phil. Sci.]. This paper has a well-known back-story, concerning work by Stachel and Norton on Einsteins thinking in the years 1913-15. Less well-known is a connection between the hole argument and Earmans work on Leibniz in the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn can be traced to an argument first presented in 1975 by Howard Stein. Remarkably, this thread originates with a misattribution: the argument Earman attributes to Stein, which ultimately morphs into the hole argument, was not the argument Stein gave. The present paper explores this episode and presents some reflections on how it bears on the subsequent literature.
rate research
Read More
We address a recent proposal concerning surplus structure due to Nguyen et al. [Why Surplus Structure is Not Superfluous. Br. J. Phi. Sci. Forthcoming.] We argue that the sense of surplus structure captured by their formal criterion is importantly different from---and in a sense, opposite to---another sense of surplus structure used by philosophers. We argue that minimizing structure in one sense is generally incompatible with minimizing structure in the other sense. We then show how these distinctions bear on Nguyen et al.s arguments about Yang-Mills theory and on the hole argument.
A Norton algebra is an eigenspace of a distance regular graph endowed with a commutative nonassociative product called the Norton product, which is defined as the projection of the entrywise product onto this eigenspace. The Norton algebras are useful in finite group theory as they have interesting automorphism groups. We provide a precise quantitative measurement for the nonassociativity of the Norton product on the eigenspace of the second largest eigenvalue of the Johnson graphs, Grassman graphs, Hamming graphs, and dual polar graphs, based on the formulas for this product established in previous work of Levstein, Maldonado and Penazzi. Our result shows that this product is as nonassociative as possible except for two cases, one being the trivial vanishing case while the other having connections with the integer sequence A000975 on OEIS and the so-called double minus operation studied recently by Huang, Mickey, and Xu.
Typicality arguments attempt to use the Copernican Principle to draw conclusions about the cosmos and presently unknown conscious beings within it. The most notorious is the Doomsday Argument, which purports to constrain humanitys future from its current lifespan alone. These arguments rest on a likelihood calculation that penalizes models in proportion to the number of distinguishable observers. I argue that such reasoning leads to solipsism, the belief that one is the only being in the world, and is therefore unacceptable. Using variants of the Sleeping Beauty thought experiment as a guide, I present a framework for evaluating observations in a large cosmos: Fine Graining with Auxiliary Indexicals (FGAI). FGAI requires the construction of specific models of physical outcomes and observations. Valid typicality arguments then emerge from the combinatorial properties of third-person physical microhypotheses. Indexical (observer-relative) facts do not directly constrain physical theories. Instead they serve to weight different provisional evaluations of credence. These weights define a probabilistic reference class of locations. As indexical knowledge changes, the weights shift. I show that the self-applied Doomsday Argument fails in FGAI, even though it can work for an external observer. I also discuss how FGAI could handle observations in large universes with Boltzmann brains.
The subject of growth of groups has been active in the former Soviet Union since the early 50s and in the West since 1968, when articles of v{S}varc and Milnor have been published, independently. The purpose of this note is to quote a few articles showing that, before 1968 and at least retrospectively, growth has already played some role in various subjects.
Hideki Yukawa, Sin-itiro Tomonaga and Shoichi Sakata pioneered nuclear and particle physics and left enduring legacies. Their friendly collaboration and severe competition laid the foundation to bring up the active postwar generation of nuclear and particle physicists in Japan. In this presentation we illustrate milestones of nuclear and particle physics in Japan from 1930s to mid-1940s which have been clarified in Yukawa Hall Archival Library, Tomonaga Memorial Room and Sakata Memorial Archival Library.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
