[PhilPhys] Warsaw Spacetime Colloquium: James Read (30 October on Zoom)

[Antonio Vassallo]

(With apologies for cross-posting)

On Friday, 30 October, James Read (University of Oxford) will give a talk
entitled “Shifts and reference” (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (16:00-18:00 CET). If you have
not registered yet, you can do so by sending a message to
antonio.vassallo at pw.edu.pl.

The Colloquium is organized by the Philosophy of Physics Group
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3168> at the International Center
for Formal Ontology (Warsaw University of Technology). The program for the
winter semester can be found here
<https://icfo.ans.pw.edu.pl/en/?page_id=3389>.

The recordings of the previous meetings are available on the ICFO's YouTube
channel
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-1yNCyvJJAfiq7LDFjfYc1I5OOxhJ1A>.

ABSTRACT
Maudlin’s ‘metric essentialist’ response to the hole argument of general
relativity is well-known, but differs strikingly from his response to what
is often regarded as being the analogous problem in the context of
Newtonian gravity (namely, the possibility of a Leibnizian static shift),
which centres around a certain epistemological argument. In this talk, I
explicate the reasons underlying this divergence of responses. I then apply
recent work from the philosophy of language in order to assess Dasgupta’s
arguments that Maudlin’s epistemological argument given in response to the
static shift is unsuccessful, which are based upon the notion of
‘inexpressible ignorance’. I argue that Dasgupta’s reading of Maudlin is
not quite correct; rather, Maudlin should be read as endorsing both (a)
Hawthorne and Manley’s ‘liberalism about reference and singular thought’,
and (b) Kaplan’s conception of indexicals. That said, Dasgupta’s point can
still be made by rejecting either (a) or (b). Finally, I analyse how the
epistemological argument plays out in the context of the gauge redundancy
in electromagnetism, finding that the situation is interestingly different
from the spacetime case. (Based upon joint work with Bryan Cheng.)
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