Two dogmas of dynamicism
- PDF / 403,500 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 72 Downloads / 137 Views
Two dogmas of dynamicism James Owen Weatherall1 Received: 20 February 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract I critically discuss two dogmas of the “dynamical approach” to spacetime in general relativity, as advanced by Harvey Brown [Physical Relativity (2005) Oxford:Oxford University Press] and collaborators. The first dogma is that positing a “spacetime geometry” has no implications for the behavior of matter. The second dogma is that postulating the “Strong Equivalence Principle” suffices to ensure that matter is “adapted” to spacetime geometry. I conclude by discussing “spacetime functionalism”. The discussion is presented in reaction to and sympathy with recent work by James Read [“Explanation, geometry, and conspiracy in relativity theory” (2020) Thinking about Spacetime Boston: Birkäuser]. Keywords General relativity · Dynamical view · Functionalism · Geometric view · Strong equivalence principle
1 Introduction In a recent paper, James Read (2020) has proposed a detente in an active and ongoing debate in the foundations of spacetime theories, between defenders of the “geometrical approach” to spacetime structure and those of the “dynamical approach”, introduced by Brown and Pooley (1999, 2006) and elaborated and defended by Brown (2005).1 The geometrical view, Read suggests, has been given an unfair treatment by recent defenders of the dynamical view—including Read and his collaborators (e.g., Read et al. 2018; Brown and Read 2016, forthcoming). Really, there are two versions of the 1 For a recent, but somewhat one-sided, review of this literature, see Brown and Read (forthcoming). The dynamical view is clearly articulated in the papers cited in the main text. But since the “geometrical view” is the received view, it is somewhat difficult to identify a locus classicus for its statement. I would argue that the view goes back at least to Weyl (1952). It is also the view implicitly found in, for instance, Hawking and Ellis (1973), Wald (1984), and Malament (2012b); see also Stein (1977), discussed in the final section of this paper. Friedman (1983), Torretti (1983), and Maudlin (2012) are all sometimes cited as defenders of the geometrical view.
B 1
James Owen Weatherall [email protected] Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California Irvine, Irvine, USA
123
Synthese
geometrical view that Read detects in the literature: what he calls the “unqualified” and “qualified” geometrical approaches. (I will describe these below.) The first of these, he argues, is untenable. But the second, which he tentatively attributes to Maudlin (2012) and more confidently attributes to me (Weatherall 2019), is tenable after all, he says. In fact, Read thinks, on reflection it is hard to see what the disagreement between the qualified geometrical view and the dynamical view is supposed to be, at least in the context of general relativity.2 Indeed, Read argues that my (Weatherall 2019) is best read as endorsing not only the dynamical approach, but also a version of space
Data Loading...
