Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Following Dewar (2019), ‘reduction’ and ‘sophistication’ are supposed to be two different ways of articulating the shared content of symmetry-related models of physical theories. And yet: there does not exist in the literature a maximally clear, maximally general statement as to what the distinction between reduction and sophistication amounts to. In this article, we present a proposal in order to redress this issue: the proposal is to understand reduction and sophistication not as intrinsic properties of physical theories, but rather as four-place relations between two theories, a map between those theories, and a set of symmetries of the former theory. We go on to extol various virtues of this way of thinking about the reduction/sophistication distinction.
Source: Synthese
Authors: Eleanor March, James Read
Institutions: University of California, Irvine, University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,190
OpenAlex ID: W7110568355
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