Abstract
One of the reasons provided for the shift away from an ontology for physical reality of material objects & properties towards one of physical structures & relations (Ontological Structural Realism: OntSR) is that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of similar elementary particles entails they are indiscernible. As material objects, they ‘whither away’, and when they wither away, structures emerge in their stead. We inquire into the question whether recent results establishing the weak discernibility of elementary particles pose a threat for this quantum-mechanical reason for OntSR, because precisely their newly discovered discernibility prevents them from ‘whithering away’. We argue there is a straightforward manner to consider the recent results as a reason in favour of OntSR rather than against it.
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Acknowledgment
Thanks to the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) for financial support and to remarks of an anonymous referee.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Muller, F.A. Withering away, weakly. Synthese 180, 223–233 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9609-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9609-6