Read, James (2025) Good VIBES only. [Preprint]

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Abstract

How to articulate the common ontological commitments of symmetry-related models of physical theories? This is a central (perhaps the central) question in the philosophical literature on symmetry transformations in physics; recently, Dewar (2019) has proposed a strategy for answering this question which goes by the name of 'external sophistication'. And yet: this strategy has been accused of being hopelessly obscure by, among others, Martens and Read (2020). In this article, I demonstrate that not all cases of external sophistication are subject to this charge---for reasons which will become clear, the cases for which this is not so give us what I'll call 'good VIBES'. Having established this, I then go on to consider good VIBES in the context of the analysis of hidden symmetries, in dialogue with recent work on that topic by Bielińska and Jacobs (2024).

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Read, James james.read@philosophy.ox.ac.uk
Keywords:	symmetries; sophistication; hidden symmetries
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances
Depositing User:	Dr. James Read
Date Deposited:	16 Apr 2025 13:10
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2025 13:10
Item ID:	25073
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances
Date:	15 April 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25073

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