Read, James and March, Eleanor (2026) Substantive general covariance meets naturality. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Almost since its inception, the question of whether there is any substantive sense in which general relativity is distinguished from other theories of space and time has exercised physicists and philosophers alike (Norton 1993). In recent decades, this question has been tied up with trying to identify a sense in which general relativity is 'background independent' (Read 2023). While many proposals for background independence are now on the table, all have their discontents, and it is not obvious in any case that they are satisfied only by general relativity. In this article, we review recent approaches to substantive general covariance and background independence, and spend significant time bringing this prior work into contact with the formalism of 'natural theories', which has recently been proposed by Weatherall and March (forthcoming) to be a promising way of cashing out general covariance.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | |||||||||
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| Additional Information: | For Comprehensive Philosophy of Science, edited by Al Wilson (Elsevier, 2026). | |||||||||
| Keywords: | general covariance; background independence; diffeomorphism invariance; naturality; gauge naturality; hole argument; fibre bundles | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. James Read | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 25 Jun 2026 21:48 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2026 21:48 | |||||||||
| Item ID: | 30271 | |||||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory Specific Sciences > Physics > Symmetries/Invariances |
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| Date: | 24 June 2026 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/30271 |
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