IN SEARCH OF (SPACETIME) STRUCTURALISM

Abstract

The debate between substantivalists and relationists about space-time was given a new lease of life approximately twenty years ago, when John Earman and John Norton published an argument for the conclu-sion that, in the light of general relativity, substantivalism is untenable. Responses to Earman and Norton’s argument generated a proliferation of ‘substantivalisms’, and a debate between them that was, to the ears of at least some, distinctively metaphysical in character. Dissatisfied with this apparently idle metaphysics, several philoso-phers started to suspect that there was something wrong with the de-bate: that, perhaps, the questions it aimed to address had some false presupposition, or that its practitioners had missed the most plausi-ble part of logical space. These philosophers often called themselves ‘structuralists’; they made (and continue to make) a bewildering vari-ety of claims that appeared at some times to be interlinked, at others to be unrelated; at some times to be eminently plausible, at others to be obviously false. This paper is my preliminary attempt to untangle the ‘structuralist’ literature and to see what of value, if anything, it might add to the pre-existing debate. 1

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