Baptiste Le Bihan, James Read (2018), Philosophy Compass 13(12), e12555 — DOI-10.1111/phc3.12555
Key takeaways
- Read naively, duality-related theories give rival ontologies. The interpretive options form a six-way taxonomy (underdetermination, discrimination or nihilism about the dual worlds, each with or without the common core as a candidate), plus two alternatives to the common core: an overarching theory, and a novel “pluralism” on which all dual structures are co-instantiated.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-152. What follows is what the work says about itself.
A duality is a formal map between the solution spaces of two empirically equivalent theories, and dualities are pervasive in string theory and QFT. Read naively, dual theories disagree about spacetime structure, fundamental ontology and mereology, which raises underdetermination questions. The authors give a non-technical survey of the possible ontological interpretations. They offer an enriched taxonomy, several of whose options are new to the literature.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 35 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-152 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the shortest clear map of the realist options for interpreting dualities. It is a nontechnical survey, not an argument for any option. Its original contributions (the discrimination/common-core overlap, a defence of discrimination for AdS/CFT, and pluralism) are presented as options, not established.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-152, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — a survey the skim largely captures (t=35s, 2 sessions). It is useful as a taxonomy for the duality cluster.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-152 is that reading):
- A concise map of interpretive options that complements LIT-199 (De Haro & Butterfield) and is relevant to LIT-215’s use of dualities for informational structural realism.
- It links dualities to mereology and structural realism (structuralism in §4). Check how §4 treats OSR’s claim to dissolve the problem.
- Pluralism is flagged as novel but weak. Check whether later literature has developed it.
Access when seeded: The Wiley page was blocked by Cloudflare. I read the accepted manuscript (27 pp., “Forthcoming in Philosophy Compass”) from Archive ouverte UNIGE (unige:113070, found via Unpaywall) by text extraction; page numbers below are the PDF’s. Crossref gives online 2018-10-15 and volume/issue 13(12). I did not look for an earlier preprint. Keywords are my own.