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Holes and Determinism: Another Look

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Stephen Leeds
Stephen Leeds*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Colorado-Boulder
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Abstract

I argue that Earman and Norton's familiar “hole argument” raises questions as to whether GTR is a deterministic theory only given a certain assumption about determinism: namely, that to ask whether a theory is deterministic is to ask about the physical situations described by the theory. I think this is a mistake: whether a theory is deterministic is a question about what sentences can be proved within the theory. I show what these sentences look like: for interesting theories, a harmless bit of infinitary logic puts in an appearance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 425 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1995

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado-Boulder, 169 Hellems, Campus Box 232, Boulder, CO 80309-0232.

References

Butterfield, J. (1989), “The Hole Story”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40: 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Earman, J. (1989), World Enough and Space-Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Montague, R. (1974), “Deterministic Theories”, in Formal Philosophy. New York: Yale University Press.Google Scholar