Sophistication about Symmetries

Abstract

Suppose that one thinks that certain symmetries of a theory reveal ‘surplus structure’. What would a formalism without that surplus structure look like? The conventional answer is that it would be a reduced theory: a theory that traffics only in structures invariant under the relevant symmetry. In this article, I argue that there is a neglected alternative: one can work with a sophisticated version of the theory, in which the symmetries act as isomorphisms. 1. Introduction2. Symmetry3. Reduction4. Sophistication5. Equivalence6. ConclusionAppendix

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 118 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.