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theses

What is the world fundamentally like? In my dissertation I explore and defend the idea that we should look for accounts of reality that avoid redundant structure. This idea plays a central role in science, and I believe its has the potential to be extremely powerful and fruitful in metaphysics as well. I identify three forms of redundancy in metaphysics: empirical, metaphysical and axiomatic redundancy. Avoiding these forms of redundancy imposes powerful constraints on acceptable accounts in metaphysics; we should look for views that (i) do not posit unnecessary structure, (ii) characterize the world without redundancy, and (iii) avoid unexplained patterns at the fundamental level. I argue against widely accepted accounts of physical magnitudes and space and time on the basis that they suffer from these forms of explanatory redundancy, and in their place I develop novel accounts that are not explanatorily defective in this way. Chapter one argues that the structure of quantitative properties is reducible to facts about the dynamical roles different magnitudes play in the laws of nature, so that 2kg mass is greater than 1kg mass in virtue of the fact that these magnitudes give rise to different consequences for how things accelerate. Chapter two argues that the spatial and temporal arrangement of the world reduces to facts about its causal structure, so that you are closer to your pint of beer than to the moon in virtue of thefact that you causally interact more strongly with the beer than the moon. In the final chapter I argue that although physics describes the world in the language of mathematics, there are compelling reasons to think that this description is not fundamental, for it is extrinsic and involves conventional choices of scale. If this is right then corresponding to every mathematical description of the world there is an intrinsic description that characterizes the physical structure of reality directly. I conclude that the fundamental physical laws are not the laws of physics.

ETD_6417

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Marco Korstiaan Dees

doi:10.7282/T34T6M61

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.