Ontic structuralism or ontic structural realism in the philosophy of physics can be broadly considered as an interpretative strategy providing a set of conceptual and metaphysical tools—or, more ambitiously, an ontological framework—in order to account for central features of current fundamental physics. This article aims to review the main structuralist interpretative moves in the context of our two best fundamental physical theories of matter and spacetime, namely, quantum theory and general relativity. We highlight in particular the structuralist understanding of permutation (...) invariance, entanglement and nonlocality in quantum theory, and of the dynamical features of spacetime, diffeomorphism invariance and background independence in general relativity. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to assess the relative merits of two formal representations of structure, namely, set theory and category theory. The purpose is to articulate ontic structural realism. In turn, this will facilitate a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of both concepts and will lead to a proposal for a pragmatics-based approach to the question of the choice of an appropriate framework. First, we present a case study from contemporary science—a comparison of the formulation of quantum (...) mechanics in the language of Hilbert spaces and abstract C* algebras. It is then shown how the method of structural representation can be determined based on the pragmatics of goal-oriented research, not a dogmatic choice. We investigate a hypothesis stating that the use of the interplay between the powers of abstraction and detail of different representational methods results in adopting a pluralistic, as opposed to standard, unificatory, perspective on the role of structural representation in OSR. (shrink)