STEVEN FRENCH and JAMES LADYMAN

THE DISSOLUTION OF OBJECTS: BETWEEN PLATONISM AND PHENOMENALISM

With our invitation to sup with the structuralists so cruelly rebuffed, we must turn again to the confusions and disagreements that remain between Cao and ourselves. We are still not persuaded that these are as numerous or as deep as Cao seems to think but here we shall focus on the following issues:

1. HOW MUCH METAPHYSICAL BAGGAGE DO WE HAVE TO CARRY ?

One of the motivations for Ladymans ontic form of SR is that it offers the realist some hope that she may be able to get away with carrying less metaphysical baggage than the standard realist without having to fall into the clutches of the constructive empiricist. This seems to us to be a particularly important consideration when it comes to the foundations of quantum physics, whether QM or QFT. In the context of the former, one of us has long argued for a kind of metaphysical underdetermination between particles-as-individuals and particles-as-non-individuals. Ladyman has further insisted that a realism which refuses to address the issue of which package to adopt is a realism in name only, Ontic SR effectively side-steps the underdetermination and thus allows the realist to drop the metaphysics by focusing on the commonality of structure. Caos response is to insist that there is no metaphysics to be dropped since we can understand individuality in terms of distinguishability ( la Strawson), which in turn can be empirically ascertained. But this is problematic. First of all, this metaphysical underdetermination is predicated on a conceptual distinction between individuality and distinguishability (one of us French has tried to make this clear in all his published work on this subject). If one wishes to deny this distinction then some argument must be given, otherwise the move smacks of simple question begging. More importantly, however, the kind of understanding of individuality Cao supports is famously problematic. If distinguishability is to ground the individuality of things then some form of metaphysical guarantee must be
Synthese 136: 7377, 2003. 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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sought which ensures the impossibility of such things being indistinguishable. Leibniz saw this and introduced his infamous Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles as just such a guarantee. As we are sure Cao is aware, this Principle has had a less than happy time of it in the quantum domain. Furthermore, appealing to Strawsons view of individuality may also not be the best move to make. There are two aspects of his analysis which are relevant here: the rst has to do with his interpretation of individuality as impredicability the idea that an individual is simply a logical subject which cannot serve as a predicate an interpretation that Ayer characteristically dismissed as not illuminating (Ayer 1954, p. 3). The second aspect concerns the issue of the identication of particulars and Strawson argues that the general conditions of such identication require a unied system of spatio-temporal entities, such as is constituted by the material universe. Whether such a system is viable and Strawsons conditions met in the context of modern physics is contentious, to say the least. In particular, the kind of framework Strawson advocates appears least problematic if some form of substantival understanding of space-time is assumed, since the relational view leads to an obvious circularity. Unfortunately, it is precisely a form of the latter that Cao advocates in his other work (see Cao forthcoming). With regard to QFT, the relationship between the particle and eld representations is not as unproblematic as Cao seems to think (see, for example, the recent survey in Huggett 2000), nor are we as ignorant of recent developments as he suggests. Indeed, we acknowledged that . . . given the rejection of particles as the basic ontology in QFT, it seems to us that the sort of developments Cao very nicely charts provide powerful support for the metaphysical SR programme. However, we insist that if elds are more fundamental then the standard realist owes us all an answer to Redheads question, what is a eld? And such an answer must be given in terms of an appropriate metaphysics. It is here that a form of underdetermination arises again, between elds as substantival and elds as properties of space-time points. Cao, like Chakravartty, thinks this kind of underdetermination is innocuous but the response we gave to Chakravartty in footnote 14 applies here too in the case of unobservable entities like elds the content of belief in them is exhausted by their theoretical description and if that underdetermines their metaphysical nature then our belief is empty. Again, standard realism is gutted. Best, then, to understand elds structurally.

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2. IS THE ONTIC STRUCTURAL REALIST A MATHEMATICAL

PLATONIST OR A SCIENTIFIC ANTI - REALIST, OR BOTH ?

Cao persists in lumbering us with two seemingly contradictory identications that we thought we had rejected in our paper. The rst concerns the identication between physical structures and mathematical ones, which Cao then takes to imply that the ontic structural realist must be a Platonist. (There are, of course, connections which can be made between structural realism in the philosophy of science and structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics but we shall leave those for another time.) Now, we did say that the distinction between the mathematical and the physical may become blurred, particularly if the mark of the latter has to do with substance or individual objects or the like. Nevertheless, blurring does not imply identity. The mathematical can be trivially distinguished from the physical in that there is more of it; there is more mathematics than we know what to (physically) do with, which is what Redhead expressed with his notion of surplus structure. What makes a structure physical? Well, crudely, that it can be related via partial isomorphisms in our framework to the (physical) phenomena. This is how physical content enters. Less trivially, the mathematical can be distinguished from the physical in that the latter is also causal, as Cao emphasises. But again, we acknowledged that causal relations constitute a fundamental feature of the structure of the world (something that Chakravartty has also highlighted in this context; Chakravartty 1998), so in this sense we deny the identity. The second mis-identication is with broadly structural approaches within physics, such as Gell-Manns boot-strap theory. On this all we can do is repeat what weve already written: the structural realist is not committed to enjoining physicists to stop talking about, or looking for, particles. Our commitments are metaphysical: once the Higgs boson has been discovered, how is it to be understood, metaphysically? As an individual object? As a non-individual? Or, better we think, as an aspect of structure? Cao understands us as advocating the dissolution of physical entities into mathematical structures. But, rst of all, by dissolution we mean metaphysical reconceptualisation. And secondly, as we tried to emphasise, to describe something using mathematics does not imply that it itself is mathematical the structures are what they are and we describe them in mathematico-physical terms. Let us put it as clearly as we can: we are not mathematical Platonists with regard to structures nor are we Gell-Mannian phenomenalists with regard to particles.

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3. WHAT IS CAO S POSITION ?

In our paper we tried to explore Caos own position a little, pointing out that although he has been taken by some to be of the ontic persuasion, he himself appears to incline towards the epistemic form. Now Cao tells us that he is neither, that he sees his position as a third way of some sort. The central claim seems to be that we can . . . know underlying entities through our structural knowledge without dissolving them into mathematical structures. Now this seems strikingly similar to the core idea of Chakravarttys semi-realism (op. cit.), which attempts to unite a form of entity realism with Worralls (epistemic) structural realism. Indeed Chakravartty argues that not only does structural realism imply entity realism a claim with which Cao will surely be sympathetic but vice versa. The argument hinges on a distinction between detection properties and auxiliary properties. As the name suggests, the former are those properties of an entity by means of which we detect it; that is, they concern the causal powers that come to be associated with the entity. Auxiliary properties, on the other hand, are those further properties which are introduced as part of our efforts to get a theoretical grip on the entity concerned, but which may eventually be abandoned in the process of theory change (and, of course, properties that are initially thought of as detection properties might eventually come to be seen as auxiliary). Entity realism, then, is the view that we should be realists about those entities which possess the relevant detection properties. According to Chakravartty, it is implied by structural realism since the kinds of structures identied by the structural realist as being retained through theory change are precisely those which feature these detection properties. Relatedly, entity realism implies structural realism because moving in the other direction the detection properties picked out by the entity realist will feature in those structures emphasised by the structural realist. Of absolutely critical importance in this argument is an assumption, explicitly made by Chakravartty, that relations cannot subsist without relata; it is only by means of this assumption that the rst implication can move from detection properties as features of some structure, to detection properties as giving us access to some entity underlying that structure. Just like Cao, Chakravartty insists that we know entities by means of our structural knowledge without dissolving them into the structures and, again just like Cao, Chakravartty can claim that his form of realism meshes with the attitudes of physicists towards the entities they discover. Thus we present semirealism as a possible way of making sense of Caos position. But, of course, apart from the above assumption, there is nothing here that

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the ontic structural realist cannot accommodate. As we have indicated, we agree that those features of the world structure that are typically deemed causal will play a fundamentally important part in our theorising. However, we reject the assumption that these features, or the structures in general, must be ontologically supported by underlying relata. We recall Cassirers analysis of charge surely a causal property if ever there was one which he acknowledges as a self-subsistent and permanent relation and his insistence that . . . the constancy of a certain relation is not at all sufcient for the inference of a constant carrier. In other words, just because charge exhibits a certain permanence and constancy does not imply that it must be regarded as a detection property in the sense that we use it to detect something (what?!) underlying it. There is only charge, as part of the structure. If Cao is unhappy with the above comparison, then we can only return to our original question: what does he mean by an entity? Or, in the context of Chakravarttys semirealism, what are the relata? If the nature of such an entity is not dissolved into structure, how is this non-structural nature to be understood metaphysically? Unless Cao can answer this, he is in the same boat as the standard realist. If he answers by insisting that there is no need for such a metaphysical understanding since entities, as such, can be known, then all we have to do is point out that what is known are what Chakravartty calls detection properties, and these the ontic structural realist can easily accommodate. Either an entity has an underlying metaphysical nature or it does not. If Cao agrees that it does, then he must face the problems that derive from the fact that this nature cannot be known. If he thinks that it does not, then ultimately there is nothing further to his understanding of what an entity is than what ontic structural realism yields. Our invitation to join the party stands.

REFERENCES

Ayer, A. J.: 1954, Individuals, in Philosophical Essays, Macmillan and Co., pp. 125. Chakravartty A.: 1998, Semirealism, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Science 29, 391408. Cao, T. Y.: forthcoming, Prerequisites for a Consistent Framework of Quantum Gravity, preprint. Huggett, N.: 2000, Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51, 617637.