Speaker: Neil Dewar (Oxford)
Friday 18th July 2014
Location: Ludwigstr. 31 room 028
Time: 14:15 - 15:45

The Grammar of the Problem of Time

It is widely agreed that the Problem of Time indicates that the the methods of the constrained Hamiltonian formalism are inappropriate when applied to General Relativity; the interesting question involves getting clear on why these formal methods, which work so well in other contexts, break down so radically in this case. In this talk, I argue that the basic reason is straightforward, and concerns the different representational roles of independent and dependent variables: to apply the constrained Hamiltonian method to independent variables is to treat subjects as though they were predicates, and so to lapse into ungrammatical confusion.

_______________________________________________
philphysmunich mailing list
philphysmunich@lists.lrz.de
https://lists.lrz.de/mailman/listinfo/philphysmunich