Pith Number

pith:QX4TE2IK

pith:2025:QX4TE2IK5YV5XKFPYLEYYVLN7K

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

We Have Never Been Sophisticated

Clara Bradley, James Owen Weatherall

There is no physically or philosophically important distinction between reduction and internal sophistication.

arxiv:2511.10549 v2 · 2025-11-13 · physics.hist-ph

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{QX4TE2IK5YV5XKFPYLEYYVLN7K}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

there is no physically or philosophically important distinction between what Dewar calls 'reduction' and what he calls 'internal sophistication'

C2weakest assumption

That Dewar's specific framing of reduction versus sophistication captures the key contrast in the literature and that re-examination of it reveals no important difference.

C3one line summary

The distinction between reduction and internal sophistication in handling symmetries is not important, and multiple notions of reduction in the literature should be distinguished.

References

39 extracted · 39 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] , author Bartel, T 2004

[2] author Barrett, T.W. , year 2022 . title How to count structure . journal No\^ u s volume 56 , pages 295--322 2022

[3] author Belot, G. , year 1995 . title New work for counterpart theorists: Determinism . journal The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science volume 46 , pages 185--195 1995

[4] author Belot, G. , year 2003 . title Symmetry and gauge freedom . journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics volume 34 , pages 189 2003

[5] author Belot, G. , author Earman, J. , year 1999 . title Pre-socratic quantum gravity , in: editor Callender, C. , editor Huggett, N. (Eds.), booktitle Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale . p 1999

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-17T23:39:00.785456Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

85f932690aee2bdba8afc2c98c556dfaa2513669a1f2d9ab31958b6a83101ca7

Aliases

arxiv: 2511.10549 · arxiv_version: 2511.10549v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2511.10549 · pith_short_12: QX4TE2IK5YV5 · pith_short_16: QX4TE2IK5YV5XKFP · pith_short_8: QX4TE2IK

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/QX4TE2IK5YV5XKFPYLEYYVLN7K \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 85f932690aee2bdba8afc2c98c556dfaa2513669a1f2d9ab31958b6a83101ca7

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "5718b48dd18b52e385f2043437549e87f941ebe42abf9137c96bb430ac393c13",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "physics.hist-ph",
    "submitted_at": "2025-11-13T17:51:30Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "1a8737ea5f6bb1aa9d1fe7c85104ddcb05b56f13683c21286e54bdc78cf6e14c"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2511.10549",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}