• January 22, 2027
  • 3:00p.m. - 5:00p.m.
  • Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 1321
  • Thomas Barrett, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UC Santa Barbara

-----

Barrett will discuss definability in the context of general relativity. Barrett will introduce a hierarchy of varieties of implicit definability for relativistic spacetimes that parallels the asymmetry hierarchy of Manchak and Barrett (2026), and compare these with related notions. He will then use these results about definability to draw out some corollaries of broader philosophical interest. In particular, he will isolate a few special cases in which symmetry provides a perfect guide to the structure of a relativistic spacetime, and remark on why symmetry can be fruitfully used to compare amounts of structure.

-----

  • Contact: Logan Lanis, llanis@uci.edu, or Olga Dunaevsky, odunaevs@uci.edu
  • Sponsor: Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science

 

School Calendar

Archive

Connect with us: