Landsman, Klaas
(2022)
Reopening the Hole Argument.
[Preprint]
Abstract
The aim of this expository paper is to argue that although Weatherall (2018) and Halvorson & Manchak (2022) claim to `close the Hole Argument', its philosophical thrust may be resurrected by rephrasing the argument in terms of the theorem of Choquet-Bruhat & Geroch (1969) on the existence and uniqueness of maximal globally hyperbolic solutions to the Einstein field equations for suitably posed initial data. This not only avoids the controversial pointwise identification of manifolds underlying non-isometric spacetimes, but also suggests a precise notion of determinism intrinsic to GR (as an initial value problem), which may be compared e.g. with the one proposed by Butterfield. We also discuss generally covariant special relativity in this context, and finally muse about possible implications for the general philosophy of science.
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