Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 6: Foundations of Gravity

AGPhil 6.2: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 23. März 2022, 14:45–15:15, AGPhil-H14

Perturbing the hole argument — •John Dougherty — Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich

The recent literature on the hole argument has seen a reappraisal of its mathematical aspects. According to this reappraisal, as Halvorson and Manchak succinctly put it, there are two mathematical claims that might be thought to underwrite the hole argument, and neither in fact does. The claim that there are isomorphic but distinct Lorentzian manifolds is trivial, and the claim that there is a diffeomorphism that spoils the determinism is false. In this paper I argue that at least one version of the hole argument is underwritten by a third mathematical claim: that the configuration space of general relativity is ``natural'', which is to say that it depends functorially on the base manifold. This claim is nontrivial in the sense that it is not true in many theories, such as those containing spinor fields. But it is true in a tensorial theory like general relativity. And it underwrites the version of the hole argument that analogizes general covariance to the ``gauge'' nature of general relativity as it is used in perturbative contexts such as calculations concerning gravitational radiation and semiclassical effects.