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Even if we are able to decide on a canonical formulation of our theory, there is the further problem of metaphysical underdetermination with respect to, for example, whether the entities postulated by a theory are individuals or not... We need to recognise the failure of our best theories to determine even the most fundamental ontological characteristic of the purported entities they feature... What is required is a shift to a different ontological basis altogether, one for which questions of individuality simply do not arise. Perhaps we should view the individuals and nonindividuals packages, like particle and field pictures, as different representations of the same structure. There is an analogy here with the debate about substantivalism in general relativity. (Ladyman, 1998) In his paper “What is Structural Realism? ” (1998) James Ladyman drew a distinction between epistemological structural realism (ESR) and metaphysical (or ontic) structural realism (OSR). In recent years this distinction has set much of the agenda for philosophers of science interested in scientific realism. It has also led to the emergence of a related discussion in the philosophy of physics that concerns the alleged difficulties of interpreting general relativity that revolve around the question of the ontological status of spacetime points. Ladyman drew a suggestive analogy between the perennial debate between substantivalist and relationalist interpretations of spacetime on the one hand, and the debate about whether quantum mechanics treats identical particles as individuals or as ‘non-individuals ’ on the other. In both cases, Ladyman’s suggestion is that a structural realist interpretation of the physics—in particular, an ontic structural realism—might

Aristotelian, or non-Platonist, realism holds that mathematics is a science of the real world, just as much as biology or sociology are. Where biology studies living things and sociology studies human social relations, mathematics studies the quantitative or structural aspects of things, such as ratios, or patterns, or complexity,

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