Priority and Particle Physics: Ontic Structural Realism as a Fundamentality Thesis

Romanian Studies in Philosophy of Science

“…Non-fundamental entities are derived, emergent, composed, etc. In philosophy of physics, fundamentalism about entities is more frequently called "fundamentality" (McKenzie, 2011(McKenzie, , 2014. It expresses the intuition that there should be a fundamental level of reality, and that the chain of ontological priority and compositionality relations should terminate somewhere, in a "fundamental base".…”

Algebraic structuralism

“…The relevant observation is then that such a permutation commutes with the dynamics: the final states obtained by letting the original and permuted states evolve (under any dynamics with which we are familiar) will be related by exactly that same permutation. Therefore the permutation is, in a certain sense, "decoupled" from the dynamical evolution: differences at one time over which individuals have which properties and relations do not lead to any other [McKenzie, 2014b], [McKenzie, 2014a]). I only outline two here, because they are the two which connect most directly with what I want to say; for a comprehensive overview of structuralism and the motivations for it, see [Frigg and Votsis, 2011].…”

Philosophy of Science A Personal Peek into the Future

“…Thus, Teller long ago appropriated the concept of supervenience for the philosophy of science and employed it to articulate a view of quantum entanglement as involving non‐supervenient relations (Teller ). Notions of dependence of course feature prominently in discussion of causation but have recently been applied to consideration of the relationship between numbers, say, and mathematical structures (Linnebo ) or between elementary particles and the symmetries of the Standard Model (McKenzie forthcoming). Moving to the more general level of argumentative strategies and manoeuvres, it is interesting to consider how eliminativism in physics, for example, might be supported by the moves deployed by metaphysical monists and nihilists elsewhere.…”