Graham Nerlich

Why Spacetime Is Not a Hidden Cause: A Realist Story

Spacetime realism requires that it is not hidden and not a cause. Its style of explanation is geometrical. It is argued that causal explanation is unworkable for cases of pure gravitation. Non-causal explanation is geometrical and exploits several identities where one might expect causal explanation. Thus a realist understanding of General Relativity is to be preferred.

Values and valuing : speculations on the ethical life of persons

Valuing in the life of a person Of science and religion On the state of being a person Persons and their desires The dialectic of desire and value Emotions and feelings Authentic and objective values The meaning and the goodness of life References Index

Simultaneity and Convention in Special Relativity

What physics books are apt to say about SR (Special Relativity) is not quite the same as what philosophy books are apt to say about it, as Wesley Salmon points out in his excellent Space, Time and Motion (Salmon [1975a], p. 113). He explains this difference reasonably enough, as due to disparate main interests which SR has for physicists as against philosophers. The former want to develop quickly an apparatus which allows the clear, deft portrayal of central principles and results in physical prediction and explanation. The latter prefer a more leisured approach to this goal so as to give scope for a deeper insight into the semantic-syntactic structure of SR. Most philosophy books say that the language of SR has various conventional elements in it, which means that the theory can have no very simple relation between its syntax and its semantics. In particular, the matter of the simultaneity of space-like separated events is settled conventionally and this gives rise to a contrast in SR between sentences which form a factual core (Winnie [1970], p. 229, Salmon [1975a], p. 117) and others which make up a periphery of non-factual sentences with a merely syntactic function. In what follows I ignore the problem of what other conventions might have a place in SR. I want to examine and reject just this idea that simultaneity is a convention, as this gives rise to the idea that we can contrast a core of factual sentences of SR with a periphery of merely conventional ones.

What Spacetime Explains: Metaphysical Essays on Space and Time.@@@The Shape of Space.

Preface Introduction Part I. Ontology and Methodology in Relativity: 1. On learning from the mistakes of Positivists 2. What ontology can be about with Andrew Westwell-Roper 3. Special relativity is not based on causality 3. Simultaneity and convention in special relativity 5. Motion and change of distance Part II. Variable Curvature and General Relativity: 6. How Euclidean geometry has misled metaphysics 7. What can geometry explain? 8. Is curvature intrinsic to physical space? 9. Holes in the hole argument Part III. Time and Causation: 10. Can time be finite? 11. How to make things have happened Bibliography Index.

Holes in the Role Argument

John Earman and John Norton claim that modern spacetime realists (substantivalists) face a new problem: a realist can’t also be a determinist. They argue this both separately (Earman 1989, Norton 1987) and together, notably, in Earman and Norton 1987. The problem has been tackled here and there, mainly in attempts to find a picture of determinism which evades the problem. (Butterfield 1987, 1989, Maudlin 1988).

On Learning from the Mistakes of Positivists

Publisher Summary This chapter describes three ways in which a philosophical study can be regarded as tracing the foundations of space-time theory. Positivist investigations search for the restrictive foundations of theories that consist of a minimal ideology—foundationalism—and a minimal set of axioms, which generate a body of theorems previously judged as indispensable. To call this the restrictive foundation stresses its tendency to reduce content and prune ideology. One motive behind a realist examination of a theory is to look for its permissive foundations. Whereas the restrictive foundation presents all the theorems one simply must have, the permissive foundation presents axioms and predicates within which one can speculate most radically on how that same theory may develop.

The Shape of Space.

Introduction 1. Space and spatial relations 2. Hands, knees and absolute space 3. Euclidean and other shapes 4. Geometrical structures in space and spacetime 5. Shapes and the imagination 6. The aims of conventionalism 7. Against conventionalism 8. Reichenbachs treatment of topology 9. Measuring space: fact or convention? 10. The relativity of motion Bibliography Index.

A Scrutiny of Reference

1. In many of his writings, Quine has argued that language is indeterminate in various ways. He has pursued, at length and often,1 an ingenious conclusion about one such way, which he sometimes calls the inscrutability of reference and, sometimes, the inscrutability of terms. It is the conclusion that one dimension of indeterminacy leaves the references of general terms unfixed among a number of alternatives; further, that no sort of scrutiny of the terms or of the occasions of their utterance could, in principle, provide a means for settling objectively which referent to assign to a term. This single doctrine assumes various guises: there is a firm claim about incompatible but equally acceptable translations of certain Japanese classifiers;2 there is a somewhat less clear commitment to the inscrutability of a choice between expressions and their Gddel numbers as referents for quoted expressions; further, there is a yet more tentative endorsement of Harmans example3 of the various referents of numerical expressions given by competing set theoretic reductions of number. Lastly, and centrally to this paper, the doctrine appears as an avowed empirical conjecture,4 found plausible by Quine, that every general term that divides its reference (every sortal term) divides it inscrutably.