What a Powers-BSA Theorist Should Say About Symmetries
摘要
There is widespread consensus that a view of nothing but powers or dispositional fundamental properties struggles to accommodate physical symmetries. An option is to expand the fundamental ontology admitting extra modal elements constraining the behaviour of physical systems. Another is to eliminate symmetries altogether deeming them as dispensable structures. Either option is problematic. The expansion strategy yields a problematic ontological inflation that undermines the explanatory ambitions of the powers view. The eliminativist approach, if unsupplemented, does not deliver a naturalistically respectable view of symmetries and their role in contemporary physics. To avoid these problems, Samuel Kimpton-Nye (