Anjan Chakravartty (2011), in E. M. Landry & D. P. Rickles (eds.), Structural Realism: Structure, Object, and Causality, Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science 77, Springer (2012), ch. 10, pp. 187–206 — DOI-10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_10
Key takeaways
- Non-eliminative OSR’s core thesis, that relations are ontologically prior to their relata because they determine the relata’s identity, fails. Every workable theory of objects leaves relata with intrinsic features that fix identity, so OSR collapses back into eliminativism, and even quantum entanglement leaves particles with identity-fixing intrinsic properties (mass, charge).
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-149. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Chakravartty examines non-eliminative ontic structural realism, which keeps objects but gives relations ontological priority over them. He argues that this priority thesis is as problematic as the eliminative OSR it was meant to improve on. The result is a dilemma for anyone hoping OSR, in either form, will give realism a way forward. The argument is mainly conceptual, but he closes by showing that the physics cited for the view does not escape it.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 60 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-149 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the clearest statement of the dilemma facing relation-priority versions of OSR. Its §10.3 explication of “ontological priority” as a dependence claim is reused widely, and it names its own soft spot: the intrinsic/extrinsic asymmetry argument in §10.5.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-149, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: high — a central, clearly argued critique (t=60s) that several other works in the batch respond to. The skim captures the dilemma, but §10.5’s use of Fig. 10.1 deserves a careful reading.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-149 is that reading):
- The main opponent of the relation-priority views in this batch. Morganti’s coherentism (LIT-173) and Floridi’s difference-as-Ur-relation (LIT-152) can both be read as answers to this dilemma.
- Wallace (LIT-151) sidesteps the argument by denying that OSR should be stated in object/relation terms at all. That makes a clean three-way comparison.
- Check whether the mass/charge point survives gauge-theoretic or group-representation readings of particle identity (McKenzie).
Access when seeded: The Springer chapter page was blocked by a bot challenge. I read the published chapter PDF (20 pp., book pagination 187–206) from the author’s website (anjanchakravartty.com, “landry-rickles-book.pdf”) by text extraction. Crossref gives online 2011-11-25, with the book dated 2012. Keywords are my own.