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Confessions of a (Cheap) Sophisticated Substantivalist

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Abstract

I illustrate a challenge to a view that is a response to the Hole Argument. The view, sophisticated substantivalism, has been claimed to be the received view. While sophisticated substantivalism has many defenders, there is a fundamental tension in the view that has not received the attention it deserves. Anyone who defends or endorses sophisticated substantivalism, should acknowledge this challenge, and should either show why it is not serious or explain how to respond to it.

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Notes

  1. Those who have defended the view include Butterfield [1], Brighouse [2], Maidens [3], Pooley [4, 5], Bigaj [6], Hoefer and Cartwright [7], and Dasgupta [8].

  2. I am applying Dasgupta’s [8] example to points: This very book is blue (pointing) verses A book is blue. The fact that a book is blue “does not contain any reference to any particular book and would obtain even if a different book” (was blue).

  3. It is first suggested in [13].

  4. I won’t defend an account of what makes a property a “physical” property here, but the argument does not depend on what the details of such an account would be. By intrinsic I mean non-relational. This argument does hinge on there being intrinsic qualitative physical properties, but amongst those working on the Hole Argument this is not an area that has been the focus contention.

  5. I take this to be true, but I confess to be able to offer little in the way of argument for it. Suppose we grant that there are intrinsic qualitative physical properties (an assumption I am making) then to claim that it is logically possible that qualitatively indistinguishable parts evolve in different ways is an extraordinarily weak assumption, for logical possibility is the cheapest kind of possibility there is. I take the burden of proof to be on someone who would deny this claim. In the Max Black example, assuming, for the sake of the example, that colour is an intrinsic qualitative physical property, it amounts to the view that it is possible for just one of the globes to change colour. Another example might be more compelling. Imagine a world empty but for two atoms of a particular radioactive isotope with a half-life, say, of 138 days, and let’s say one atom decays after 138 days and the other doesn’t, and continue the analogous reasoning. Logical possibility is all I need, for I am arguing here that someone who endorses highly symmetric worlds needs to make the conceptual space for symmetry breaking violations of determinism.

  6. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED39264.

  7. Those properties Lewis dubs “natural” are those that “carve nature at the joints”, formally he is happy to take these as primitives of his theory.

  8. Super-substantivalism, discussed by Friedman [22] and Sklar [23], is a one-category ontology, but it’s not a position discussed in the literature on the hole argument.

  9. I take the most compelling argument to be a realist about any kind of entity to come from what our best physical theories commit us to. My interest in realism about points of space or spacetime is motivated by just this kind of principle. But this reason does not, by itself, provide reason to treat any such entities differently in modal contexts.

  10. It does not, of course, suggest that we care about all these apparent violations of determinism equally.

  11. The story is effectively the same when taking properties to be classes of actual objects. There are other accounts of properties, for example, tropes, and the story will likely be different depending on the particular view of tropes one might entertain.

  12. Where we understand shifts on the one-category view as a redistribution of properties to points where points of space acquire the properties of those points some distance away from them.

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Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Gordon Belot, Laura Ruetsche, Jim Weatherall, and Frank Arntzenius for helpful discussions on these issues, and thank audiences at UCLA and University of Bristol for helpful comments on talks from which this paper is derived.

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Brighouse, C. Confessions of a (Cheap) Sophisticated Substantivalist. Found Phys 50, 348–359 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-018-0228-2

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