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Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism

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Structural Realism

Part of the book series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science ((WONS,volume 77))

Abstract

The number of positions identified with structural realism in philosophical debates about scientific knowledge has grown significantly in the past decade, particularly with respect to the metaphysical or “ontic” approach (OSR). In recent years, several advocates of OSR have proposed a novel understanding of it in order to side-step a serious challenge faced by its original formulation, eliminative OSR. I examine the conceptual basis of the new, non-eliminative view, and conclude that it too faces a serious challenge, resulting in a dilemma for ontic structuralists regarding the ontological status of objects and properties, and the relative “ontological priority” of these entities with respect to the relations in which they stand.

…she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on the branch of a tree… this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

“Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”

— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the contemporary debate, ESR is canonically associated with Worrall (e.g. [31], and OSR with French [13] and Ladyman [17]). Both positions have attracted a variety of adherents and critics since, however. For a comprehensive summary of the literature, see [18].

  2. 2.

    For a more detailed discussion of the notion of concrete structure, see [6, e.g. pp. 40–41].

  3. 3.

    Ladyman and Ross [20] are clear that their position is a form of eliminative OSR, endorsing the thesis that “there are only relations, and no relata” (e.g. pp. 151–152). As we shall see, however, they sometimes appear to endorse non-eliminative OSR. Some authors advocate forms of non-eliminative OSR on which neither relations nor relata have ontological priority. I will consider this possibility in Section 10.5.

  4. 4.

    This account of the nature of properties can be traced to Shoemaker [27] and Swoyer [30], and has been discussed in significant detail more recently by a number of authors, including (for example) Hawthorne [16], Bird [3], and Chakravartty [6, chapter 5].

  5. 5.

    There are also such things as extrinsic dispositions, but their existence is inconsequential to the point here. I consider this issue in Section 10.6.

  6. 6.

    Aware of this difficulty, Ladyman and Ross [20, p. 158] thus reject the mathematical characterization of concrete reality. But their rejection goes only so far: “What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? That is a question that we refuse to answer.”

  7. 7.

    The analogy here suggests viewing objects or properties as individual nodes. Alternatively, Dipert [7] holds that an object is “a subset of the vertices of the world graph” (p. 352), and that even fine-grained entities such as subatomic particles are not vertices but “composite entities, subgraphs of the world graph” (p. 356).

  8. 8.

    For critical discussions of eliminative OSR, see [4, 24], which express different concerns regarding Platonism in that context inter alia, and [6, pp. 70–85]. For more recent developments of the view, see [15].

  9. 9.

    French [14] traces this idea as a proposal for OSR to Eddington’s view of subatomic particles (the only alternative Eddington considers is an object ontology involving substances). A similar view is described by Pooley [22, p. 98], and endorsed by Esfeld [9, 10], Rickles [25, pp. 188–191], Esfeld & Lam [11], and Floridi [12, pp. 235–236].

  10. 10.

    See [21] for a defence of the idea of extrinsic dispositions. Though some of the examples presented are arguably intrinsic dispositions described in terms of extrinsic manifestation conditions, others are clearly extrinsic.

  11. 11.

    There is no consensus among structuralists regarding how to apply SR to general relativity. Distinct from the approach of non-eliminative OSR considered here, for example, Dorato [8] views SR as furnishing a third option in debates about relationism and substantivalism, and Slowik [28] sees it as a means to avoiding these debates altogether.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was written for the Banff Workshop on “Structure, Objects, and Causality”, and developed significantly at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science. I am indebted to colleagues in both places for inspiration, as well as to audiences for different aspects of this and related work at the Universities of Miami, Canterbury, Auckland, Sydney, Concordia University, the Australian National University, and the annual Canadian Philosophical Association and Dubrovnik Philosophy of Science meetings. Special thanks are due to Philip Catton, David Chalmers, Michael Esfeld, Steven French, Jason Grossman, James Ladyman, Elaine Landry, Holger Lyre, Kerry McKenzie, and Dean Rickles.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 301 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556-4619, USA

    Anjan Chakravartty

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Correspondence to Anjan Chakravartty .

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  1. University of California, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Elaine Landry

  2. Unit for History & Philosophy of, Science, University of Sidney, Sydney, 2006, New South Wales, Australia

    Dean Rickles

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Chakravartty, A. (2012). Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism. In: Landry, E., Rickles, D. (eds) Structural Realism. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 77. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_10

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