Abstract
A world of things or a world of relations? Things have traditionally exposed scientific development to trouble. Think phlogiston. Think luminiferous ether. Things have been at the root of many problems in the foundations of physical theories. Think spacetime points. Think quantum particles. Yet things seem to be necessary for relations to make sense. How could there be a world without things; without particular objects or individuals? How could there be relations without things standing in those relations? So long as there are things, there are relations between them and, it seems, logically dependent on them so that where there are relations there must be things too. In this essay we will argue, contrary to this common line of thought, that the assumption that the world is composed of ‘things’ is wrong (or at least problematic) and that jettisoning it might plausibly lead to advances in physics. That the world is fundamentally made up of things is surely an example of a belief “so ingrained” that (with some exceptions) it has become an “unquestioned dogma” (though a perfectly understandable one). While the basic idea defended here (a fundamental ontology of brute relations) can be found elsewhere in the philosophical literature on ‘structural realism’, we have yet to see the idea used as an argument for advancing physics, nor have we seen a truly convincing argument, involving a real construction based in modern physics, that successfully evades the objection that there can be no relations without first (in logical order) having things so related. We will sketch an argument in this paper that is sufficiently general to apply to fundamental physics as a whole.
Dean Rickles