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Is there a Syntactic Solution to the Hole Problem?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Robert Rynasiewicz
Robert Rynasiewicz*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
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Abstract

After some background setting in which it is shown how Maudlin's (1989, 1990) response to the hole argument of Earman and Norton (1987) is related to that of Rynasiewicz (1994), it is argued that the syntactic proposals of Mundy (1992) and of Leeds (1995), which claim to dismiss the hole argument as an uninteresting blunder, are inadequate. This leads to a discussion of how the responses of Maudlin and Rynasiewicz relate to issues about gauge freedom and relativity principles.

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Footnotes

†

This work was supported in part by NSF Grant No. SBR-9511796.

‡

Department of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.

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