Spacetime singularities and indeterminism.

We argue for the claim that spacetime singularities in general relativity (GR) signal indeterminism, broadly construed. We first develop a schema for diagnosing a type of indeterminism for physical theories, which we denote by Indeterminism. Such indeterminism involves a broader notion of a lack of...

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Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 206; no. 2; pp. 1 - 28
Autores principales: Azhar, Feraz, Namjoo, Mohammad Hossein
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Aug2025
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Spacetime singularities and indeterminism.
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          Azhar, Feraz
          Namjoo, Mohammad Hossein
        affil:
          https://ror.org/00mkhxb43 Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
          https://ror.org/04xreqs31 School of Astronomy, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran, Iran
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      keyword:
        Black holes
        Determinism
        General relativity
        Spacetime singularities
      ab: We argue for the claim that spacetime singularities in general relativity (GR) signal indeterminism, broadly construed. We first develop a schema for diagnosing a type of indeterminism for physical theories, which we denote by Indeterminism. Such indeterminism involves a broader notion of a lack of a determination than the usual Laplacian one. More precisely, Indeterminism arises in a model of a physical theory whenever future (or past) states of the model are (i) not unique, (ii) not specified, or (iii) ‘incoherent’—that is, they fail to satisfy desiderata that the theory should reasonably satisfy. We then apply our schema to salient features of spacetime singularities in GR. We establish that, indeed, singularities signal a type of indeterminism that cannot comprehensively be understood as a variety of Laplacian indeterminism: namely, spacetime singularities in GR signal Indeterminism.
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    language: English
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