Matteo Morganti (2018), European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9(1), article 7 (2019) — DOI-10.1007/s13194-018-0233-5
Key takeaways
- What ontic structuralists say physics shows, that symmetries and invariances are fundamental, is better captured by symmetric (mutual) ontological dependence among object-like entities, “metaphysical coherentism”, than by fundamental physical relations.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-095. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Morganti argues that the usual structuralist claim that symmetries and invariances are fundamental, especially in quantum physics, should not be read as a claim that physical relations are fundamental. It should be read as metaphysical coherentism: object-like parts of reality stand in symmetric relations of ontological dependence. He develops the view and argues that symmetric dependence need not make metaphysical explanations uninformative. He also contrasts coherentism with existing structuralisms and holisms.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 100 seconds of active reading over 3 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-095 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the clearest statement of a dependence-based, object-friendly alternative to relation-first OSR, and a hub for the grounding, holism and OSR literatures; its physics applications are programmatic, and he says so himself (pp. 18–19).
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-095, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: high — the most-read item in this batch (t=100s, 3 sessions). It also sets out a distinct position that ties the structural-realism and dependence cluster together.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-095 is that reading):
- It offers a dependence-based alternative to the relation-first OSR of Ladyman, French and Floridi (LIT-152), and to Chakravartty’s reading of priority (LIT-196).
- Check the published version’s added defence of informative symmetric explanation, which the draft handles only briefly (pp. 12–13).
- It is relevant to mereology (well-foundedness, monism) and to the grounding literature.
Access when seeded: Springer page blocked by a bot challenge; Crossref gives journal online date 2018-10-27, but the PhilSci-Archive deposit (datestamp 2018-09-26) is earlier and is used as first appearance. Read the author’s accepted draft (“draft 3”, 22 pp., “forthcoming in EJPS”) from PhilSci-Archive 15063. The draft’s abstract is shorter than the published one. The published abstract (from the batch capture) adds the claims that symmetric dependence need not make explanation uninformative and a second point cut off in the capture; I have not checked how the published text develops these. Keywords are the PhilSci-Archive record’s.