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Accepted manuscript

What Do Privileged Coordinates Tell Us About Structure?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2024

Thomas William Barrett
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, UC Santa Barbara
JB Manchak
Affiliation:
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UC Irvine
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Abstract

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We examine whether the ‘privileged coordinates’ of a geometric space encode its ‘amount of structure.’ In doing so, we compare this coordinate approach to comparing amounts of structure to the more familiar auto-morphism approach. We first show that on a natural understanding of the former, it faces one of the same well known problems as the latter. We then capture a precise sense in which the two approaches are closely related to one another, and we conclude by discussing whether they might still prove useful in cases of philosophical interest, despite their shortcomings.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Science Association

Footnotes

*Thanks to David Malament, Henrique Gomes, Oliver Pooley, James Read and anonymous referees for helpful discussion of this material.