13,171 research outputs found
Structuralism as a Response to Skepticism
Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been motivated using verificationism, externalism, and coherentism. I argue that a more powerful veridicalist response to global skepticism can be motivated by structuralism, on which physical entities are understood as those that play a certain structural role. I develop the structuralist response and address objections
"100 per cent, Body and Soul”:The Ability of an Agent to Act for a Competitor of his Principal
No abstract available
Path-Integral Quantization of the (2,2) String
A complete treatment of the (2,2) NSR string in flat (2+2) dimensional
space-time is given, from the formal path integral over N=2 super Riemann
surfaces to the computational recipe for amplitudes at any loop or gauge
instanton number. We perform in detail the superconformal gauge fixing, discuss
the spectral flow, and analyze the supermoduli space with emphasis on the gauge
moduli. Background gauge field configurations in all instanton sectors are
constructed. We develop chiral bosonization on punctured higher-genus surfaces
in the presence of gauge moduli and instantons. The BRST cohomology is
recapitulated, with a new space-time interpretation for picture-changing. We
point out two ways of combining left- and right-movers, which lead to different
three-point functions.Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX; published version (typos & eq.(7.12) corrected
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