James Ladyman (2001), Philosophica 67(1), 57–76 (2001), a theme issue “The metaphysics of science” — DOI-10.21825/philosophica.82261
Key takeaways
- Ladyman argues that structural realism should be metaphysically, not epistemically, revisionary. He gives three grounds. Quantum statistics leaves the individuality of particles underdetermined: permutation invariance gives 3 two-particle states, not 4, so probabilities are 1/3 rather than 1/4 (p. 62). Entangled states give non-supervenient relations that refute Humean supervenience (pp. 71–73). The hole argument blocks point-based substantivalism (pp. 68–69). He proposes that science describes “the modal structure of the phenomena” (p. 73), with modal realism supplying the no-miracles intuition. The paper ends non-eliminatively: “the phenomena have structure but they are not structure” (p. 74).
Standing in the record
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-09-26, to put Ladyman and Ross’s ontic structural realism and rainforest realism on the record. Their book Every Thing Must Go (OUP 2007) could not be obtained from a legitimate source, nor could the two founding papers (Ladyman 1998, Ross 2000); this work is one of four freely available statements from which the views are pieced together. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-192 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — Worth reading as the earliest freely available statement of ontic structural realism by its originator. It argues the Humean-supervenience and quantum-individuality points more fully than the SEP survey (LIT-045). It also shows that the 2001 view was a modest one, realism about modal structure with no eliminativism, before Every Thing Must Go. Its positive proposal takes two paragraphs (pp. 73–74) and is programmatic.