CEFISES Seminar: Valeriya Chasova, “‘Is Faraday in the Same Boat as Galileo?’, or Symmetry and Contextuality”

Livestream https://youtu.be/k1xCM8D03DM

Series: OLOFOS

Speaker: Valeriya Chasova (UCLouvain / Université de Strasbourg)

Title: “‘Is Faraday in the Same Boat as Galileo?’, or Symmetry and Contextuality”

Abstract:

Healey (2009) argued that Galileo’s ship and Faraday’s cage empirical symmetries are dysanalogous, because direct empirical status (DES) of the corresponding theoretical symmetries arises in the former case but not in the latter. Greaves and Wallace (2014) objected that DES arises in either case, but took the dysanalogy to persist in that the latter but not the former case involves changes of the environment. I show that whether DES arises and whether the environment changes are both contextual. Moreover, on the way I resolve a much more general question of how to read off the ontological potential of theoretical symmetries from their formal properties in a wide number of cases.