Priority and Particle Physics: Ontic Structural Realism as a Fundamentality Thesis

Talk of whether there exists a fundamental basis to the world pervades contemporary metaphysics. Increasingly prominent in the metaphysics literature are arguments as to whether the world resolves itself into a set of fundamental objects or whether, on the contrary, each object is composed of more fundamental objects ad infinitum.1 But there is a school of thought that takes it that, whatever its outcome, this whole debate gets off on the wrong foot, since this school denies that fundamentality ought to be construed in terms of objects at all. According to its proponents, even if there should exist a set of ‘fundamental objects’ – in the sense of a set of entities privileged with respect to other members of the category of objects, such as the fundamental particles or fields described in our best physics – it is not the case that such objects would qualify as truly fundamental. Rather, in their view, the most basic metaphysical level of the world is constituted solely by the structures that our best physics theories describe.2