A massive variant was likewise derived in the late 1960s by Freund, Maheshwari and Schonberg, and thought to be unique. Furthermore, I criticize the claims of some previous philosophy papers on observational equivalence.Įinstein’s equations were derived for a free massless spin-2 field using universal coupling in the 1950–1970s by various authors total stress–energy including gravity’s served as a source for linear free field equations. All these results show that measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes are observationally equivalent more often than one might perhaps expect. By proving results in ergodic theory, I show that also this guess is misguided: there are several deterministic systems used in science which give the same predictions at every observation level as Markov processes. Despite this, one might guess that measure-theoretic deterministic systems used in science cannot give the same predictions at every observation level as stochastic processes used in science. I argue that this is not so because deterministic systems used in science even give rise to Bernoulli processes. Still, one might guess that the measure-theoretic deterministic systems which are observationally equivalent to stochastic processes used in science do not include any deterministic systems used in science. Conversely, I show that for all stochastic processes there is a measure-theoretic deterministic system which is observationally equivalent to the stochastic process. I first show that for many measure-theoretic deterministic systems there is a stochastic process which is observationally equivalent to the deterministic system. The central question of this paper is: are deterministic and indeterministic descriptions observationally equivalent in the sense that they give the same predictions? I tackle this question for measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes, both of which are ubiquitous in science. I describe, however, some important conceptual obstacles that must yet be overcome if the project of establishing information causality as a foundational principle of nature is to succeed. I then argue that a compelling way to motivate information causality is to in turn consider it as a further generalisation of the Einsteinian principle that is appropriate for a theory of communication. ![]() In particular I first describe an argument, due to Demopoulos, to the effect that the so-called ‘no-signalling’ condition can be viewed as a generalisation of Einstein's principle that is appropriate for an irreducibly statistical theory such as quantum mechanics. And I propose that a compelling way of so doing is to understand it as a generalisation of Einstein's principle of the mutually independent existence-the ‘being-thus’-of spatially distant things. Thus in this paper I consider whether some way might be found to successfully motivate the principle. The motivations that have so far been given are, as I argue, either unsatisfactorily vague or appeal to little if anything more than intuition. To date, however, it has not been sufficiently motivated to play such a foundational role. ![]() This form of underdetermination, I suggest, vindicates the idea that there is more than one reasonable way of understanding the ontological import of the metric tensor.The principle of ‘information causality’ can be used to derive an upper bound-known as the ‘Tsirelson bound’-on the strength of quantum mechanical correlations, and has been conjectured to be a foundational principle of nature. ![]() I show that such arguments rely on similarity assessments and then argue that the relevant similarity facts underdetermine the application of the concepts of spacetime and physical field in the context of general relativity. I critically examine the key arguments that have been offered in the literature for the view that the metric tensor represents a substantivalist spacetime. More recently, though, various theorists have come to regard this problem as a verbal dispute in which one can opt for any of the two rival interpretations of the metric according to one’s own preferences. This question took center stage in the philosophical literature on general relativity after the publication of Earman and Norton’s seminal discussion of the hole argument. I highlight the role that analogical reasoning plays in determining whether the metric represents spacetime or just a physical field. ![]() Abstract: In this paper I explore the dialectics underlying the choice between a geometrical and a field interpretation of the metric tensor in general relativity.
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