The hole argument and Putnam's paradox

Journal article

Abstract:: We discuss affinities and differences between (i) the hole argument in general relativity and (ii) Putnam’s model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism (‘Putnam’s paradox’). Following Pooley (2002), we maintain that the hole argument is not a special case of Putnam’s paradox. This notwithstanding, both of these arguments have been responded to through meta-linguistic means. While van Fraassen (1997) claims that Putnam’s paradox dissolves due to our inability to identify a function mapping our theories to objects in the world independent of our total language, Bradley and Weatherall (2022) maintain that the language of general relativity does not allow for the hole argument to be formulated. We compare these responses and assess the extent to which either is successful, concluding that we find van Fraassen’s argument more persuasive precisely because of the greater generality of Putnam’s paradox.

Files:: Cheng_and_Read_2026_The_hole_argument.pdf

(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.5MB, Terms of use)

Copyright holder:: Cheng and Read
Rights statement:: © 2026, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record