Fragmentalism and special relativity

Abstract

In 2005 Kit Fine proposed a new interpretation of the special theory of relativity \nconnected to his fragmentalist version of realism about tense. In (Hofweber and Lange \n2017) we criticized Fine’s fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity by arguing that \nit cannot explain why the Lorentz transformations hold between different fragments, \nwhereas the standard Minkowskian interpretation can easily explain this. Martin Lipman \ndefends the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity against our objection in \n(Lipman 2020). In this article we elaborate on our argument against the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity and respond to Lipman’s criticism of our argument.

Topics & Concepts