Valeriya Chasova (IHST RAS & CEFISES, UCLouvain): ’25 years to empirical statuses of theoretical symmetries: outcomes and perspectives.’

Abstract: 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of empirical statuses, direct and indirect (DES and IES), introduced in a seminal philosophy of physics paper by Kosso (2000). Symmetries of physical theories are said to have DES and/or IES if they match with empirical symmetries and/or, through theoretical conservation laws, with conservation phenomena. The initial hope was that DES and IES overturn a long-standing (for 3,5 centuries!) superfluous interpretation of theoretical symmetries, held from the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence (1717) up to Earman’s and Norton’s hole argument (1987). Instead, DES and IES would promote the interpretation of those elements of physical theories which vary under symmetry transformations as non-superfluous. And they would do that more robustly than the old gauge argument due to Weyl (1918), which has been much criticised (e.g., Martin, 2002), and less ambiguously than the subsequently found Aharonov-Bohm effect (1959, 1961), which turned out to admit non-superfluous and superfluous interpretations alike (Nounou, 2003; Healey, 2007). Now it is time to assess how much the hopes bestowed on DES and IES have been fulfilled and what remains to be achieved. I will evaluate the previous developments of these empirical statuses based on notable works by other scholars (like Greaves & Wallace 2014 for DES and Brading & Brown 2000 for IES), and I will suggest some avenues forward based on my own research (including Chasova, 2019 for DES and a more recent work-in-progress for IES).

Valeriya Chasova does research in philosophy and history of physics, particularly on the ontology of symmetries. She is visiting CPNSS this Winter Term as an EPSA Fellow.