Steven French (2010), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 43(2), 121–136 (May 2012) — DOI-10.1016/j.shpsb.2011.09.001
Key takeaways
- Unitarily inequivalent representations in QFT need not defeat structural realism. The realist can either adopt conventional (Lagrangian, cut-off) QFT, following Wallace, or take the “Swiss Army knife” line of Ruetsche, on which the structure spans all the inequivalent representations. The second option pushes her toward a profoundly modal conception of structure that also illuminates spontaneous symmetry breaking and quantum statistics.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-162. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The existence of unitarily inequivalent representations in QFT has been offered, notably by Howard, as a serious problem for structural realism. Ladyman’s founding example relied on the Stone–von Neumann equivalence of matrix and wave mechanics, and that equivalence fails for systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom. French sets out two responses: adopt conventional QFT, or take the relevant structure to span the space of inequivalent representations. He draws on spontaneous symmetry breaking and on superselection and quantum statistics, and suggests how the two options might be combined.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 10 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-162 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a leading ontic structural realist’s worked response to the strongest physics-based objection to OSR beyond finite-dimensional QM, and for its clear staging of the Wallace–Fraser and algebraic versus Hilbert-space debates. A reader should cite the 2012 journal version; this note reads the 2010 draft.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-162, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — only glanced at (t=10s), specialist QFT material. The skim captures the two-option structure.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-162 is that reading):
- A leading OSR proponent’s response to a physics-based objection, and a test case for whether structure survives beyond the finite-dimensional QM on which OSR was built.
- The modal, “trans-world” structure links to the dispositional and modal debates (Vetter, LIT-109; Chakravartty, LIT-196) and to Wallace’s math-first view (LIT-151), which it cites on conventional QFT.
- Check the published 2012 text against this draft, since the “combination” of the two options may have been revised.
Access when seeded: ScienceDirect was unreachable (bot-check page). The batch had no author; Crossref and the PhilSci-Archive record both give Steven French. I read the author’s Word preprint from PhilSci-Archive 5533 (deposited 2010-09-08, which I used as first appearance; keywords are that record’s). LibreOffice could not open the .doc, so the text was pulled out with strings. That text is complete but unpaginated and some punctuation and italics are lost, so the locations below are section names, not pages. The journal issue is dated May 2012 per Crossref, which gives no online date. The published version may differ from this 2010 draft.