Absoluteness and Relationism
From John Earman, World enough and Space-time, MIT press, 1989
I wish to add a number of extracts from Earman, in order to update Sklar's arguments.
Five major senses of Absoluteness in Newton's Scholium (modern space-time terminology is used for the convenience of later discussions)
1. Space-time is endowed with various structures that are intrinsic to it.
2. Among these structures are absolute simultaneity (i.e., a unique partition of events into simultaneity classes) and an absolute duration (i.e., a measure of temporal lapse that is independent of the path connecting the events).
3. There is an absolute reference frame that provides a unique way of identifying spatial locations through time. As a result, there is an absolute or well-defined measure of the velocity of individual particles and a well-defined measure of spatial separation for any pair of events.
4. The structure of space-time is immutable; i.e., it is the same from time to time in the actual world and from this world to other physically possible worlds.
5. Space-time is a substance in that it forms a substratum that underlies physical events and processes, and spatiotemporal relations among such events and processes are parasitic on the spatiotemporal relations inherent in the substratum of space-time points and regions. (Earman 1989, p. 11)
Three Themes of Relationism
(R1) All motion is the relative motion of bodies, and consequently, space-time does not have, and cannot have, structures that support absolute quantities of motion.
(R2) Spatiotemporal relations among bodies and events are direct; that is, they are not parasitic on relations among a substratum of space points that underlie bodies or space-time points that underlie events.
(R3) No irreducible, monadic spatiotemporal properties, like 'is located at space-time point p', appear in a correct analysis of the spatiotemporal idiom. (Earman 1989, pp. 12-3)
Last modified November 9, 1999. Soshichi Uchii