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Symmetric relations, symmetric theories, and Pythagrapheanism

Button, Timothy; (2022) Symmetric relations, symmetric theories, and Pythagrapheanism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10.1111/phpr.12920. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

It is a metaphysical orthodoxy that interesting non-symmetric relations cannot be reduced to symmetric ones. This orthodoxy is wrong. I show this by exploring the expressive power of symmetric theories, i.e. theories which use only symmetric predicates. Such theories are powerful enough to raise the possibility of Pythagrapheanism, i.e. the possibility that the world is just a vast, unlabelled, undirected graph.

Type: Article
Title: Symmetric relations, symmetric theories, and Pythagrapheanism
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/phpr.12920
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12920
Language: English
Additional information: © 2022 The Authors. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Philosophy and Phenonmenological Research Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10153946
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