9 papers
We Have Never Been Sophisticated
Clara Bradley, James Owen Weatherall
Many philosophers of physics maintain that a physical theory that exhibits (certain kinds of) symmetries is flawed, on the grounds that such theories posit "excess structure". In a…
Ceci n'est pas un gluon
India Bhalla-Ladd, Eleanor March, James Owen Weatherall
We discuss and then resolve a tension between how physicists treat gauge bosons and the celebrated "Wu-Yang dictionary", which identifies particle physics terminology with that of…
Correctness, Artificial Intelligence, and the Epistemic Value of Mathematical Proof
James Owen Weatherall, Jesse Wolfson
We argue that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a mathematical proof to have epistemic value that it be "correct", in the sense of formalizable in a formal proof system. W…
Deterministic Theories
Hans Halvorson, JB Manchak, James Owen Weatherall
Determinism is (roughly) the thesis that the past determines the future. But efforts to define it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds…
Determinism and Asymmetry in General Relativity
JB Manchak, Thomas Barrett, Hans Halvorson +1
This paper concerns the question of which collections of general relativistic spacetimes are deterministic relative to which definitions. We begin by considering a series of three…
Natural Theories
James Owen Weatherall, Eleanor March
We consider the class of physical theories whose dynamics are given by natural equations, which are partial differential equations determined by a functor from the category of n-ma…