490 Book Reviews

account of expressive qualities in art). There is much that is in this chapter,

the most interesting being a development of Ernst Gombrich’s observation
that, of an arbitrary pair of objects, there is surprising agreement as to which,
in a two-term language, would be called ‘ping’ and which ‘pong’. Green
proposes that various aspects of our experience including, on the one
hand, sensory qualities and, on the other, our emotions and moods, can be
described along a number of dimensions, including ‘intense/mild, pleasant/
unpleasant, and dynamic/static’ (p. 179). Sensory qualities and emotions and
moods have roughly congruent three dimensional structures. We can exploit

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this congruence by presenting (for example,) a sensory quality S with the
intention of showing how an emotion feels (p. 185). I cannot help feeling that
Green is onto something here, although I am not quite sure which question
his account is designed to answer. One question might be ‘What is it to
experience music as expressive?’ where what is called for is an enlightening
description of our experience of certain pieces of music. Another might be
‘What is it about the music that explains our experience of music as expres-
sive?’ where what is called upon is some kind of psychological account.
Green’s focus is on the latter question (see particularly, p. 205), although
he sometimes sees his account as a rival to (or rather, an expansion of)
answers to the former.
This is a dense book, the discussion in which sits on the intersection of
many interesting debates in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language,
ethics, aesthetics, and more. There is much in it of great interest, and much
that could be picked up and challenged or developed further. It may well be
yet another forty years before something of similar stature on this subject
is written.

Department of Philosophy DEREK MATRAVERS

The Open University
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
UK
doi:10.1093/mind/fzq007 Advance Access publication 19 May 2010

Gauging What’s Real: The Conceptual Foundations of Gauge

Theories, by Richard Healey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 320.
H/b £47.00, P/b £19.99.

I loved this book. It is not an easy read, but it is deeply rewarding — an

important monograph and a useful reference, all in one. Its 2008 Lakatos
Prize was well-earned. Gauging What’s Real is also a book that metaphysicians
should take notice of, because it overlaps with — and often challenges —
much of the literature on natural properties and Humean supervenience.

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 Book Reviews 491

But noticing Healey’s book is one thing, and comprehending its depth is
quite another. The learning curve is very steep — steeper than necessary,
perhaps. It would be outrageous to recommend that a non-specialist pick
up Gauging What’s Real without a ‘prep course’ in the philosophy of gauge
theory. So let me first provide, insofar as space allows, a prep course and a list
of introductory readings.
The place to begin is Marc Lange’s An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Physics (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), which discusses the metaphysics of
classical field theories. By the end of Chapter two of that book, you

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will have learned that electromagnetism employs a vector quantity called
the potential (one component is measured in the familiar unit of volts).
The curious thing about the potential is that its value is of no predictive
significance. Only certain derivatives of this quantity matter in the calcula-
tion of experimental predictions. As Lange notes, the ‘classic’ response
to this fact has been to deny that the potential is physically real, appealing
instead to the electric and magnetic fields as the theory’s fundamental
ontology.
If you do not finish Lange’s book (I recommend that you do), make sure to
skip ahead to page 285 of the final chapter, where he briefly explains the
Aharonov-Bohm effect. This experimentally-measured phenomenon casts
considerable doubt on the ‘classic’ ontology of electric and magnetic fields.
It turns out that electromagnetism can influence a measurable feature of
quantum particles (their complex phase) even in regions with zero electro-
magnetic field. This motivates Healey’s main project: the search for a new
ontology, beyond just the field, for electromagnetism.
With Lange under your belt, you’ll be prepared for the first six pages of
Healey, before he starts talking about fiber bundles.
This is a bit of a problem with the book, pedagogically: Healey breaks out
the mathematical big guns before he needs to. Much of what needs explain-
ing, including Aharonov-Bohm, would benefit from an informal first-pass
look which he does not provide. Fortunately, there does exist an accessible
introduction to the mathematics Healey employs: Chapter three of Tim
Maudlin’s The Metaphysics within Physics (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2007). Healey would surely ask that you take Maudlin’s philosophical claims
with a grain of salt, but I imagine he would agree that this chapter provides an
excellent introduction to fiber bundles, pitched specifically at the ‘core’
philosopher.
That is the last of the assigned reading. Now on to Healey.
His first four chapters form a self-contained study of classical (that is,
non-quantum) gauge theories. Since the Aharonov-Bohm experiment de-
pends crucially on the interaction of electromagnetism with a quantum par-
ticle, this may seem like an artificial distinction. But I urge the reader not to
be tempted by such thoughts. The metaphysical upshot of Aharonov-Bohm

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492 Book Reviews

rests on the fact that the local values of the electric and magnetic fields do not
determine the results of the experiment. Similar results could be achieved in
purely classical physics, if there were a classical complex field that interacted
with electromagnetism, the complex phase differences of which were measur-
able. In our world, as it turns out, the only such ‘field’ is the wavefunction of
a quantum particle — but that seems to be a metaphysically contingent fea-
ture of our world. So the metaphysical implications of Aharonov-Bohm
extend to at least some classical worlds, and do not essentially depend on
quantum theory.

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What are those metaphysical implications? Healey argues that the worlds
described by classical gauge theories are not made up of fundamental fields
localized at points, but instead exhibit a sort of holism. There are three lines
of response available to the Aharonov-Bohm example. One is to retain the
classic ontology of fields, but allow them to act instantaneously at a distance.
This may sound unpalatable at face. Moreover, as Healey notes it does not
make much sense (for technical reasons) to respond in this way to the
Aharonov-Bohm effect in gauge theories more complicated than electromag-
netism, such as the theory of chromodynamics that describes the strong
nuclear force.
One response that does work — technically, at least — is to accept the un-
observable potential as a real and fundamental physical quantity. This view
breaks down into a number of versions, but Healey argues that they all fall
prey to the same problem: they entail that electromagnetism is indetermin-
istic. The problem arises as follows. Suppose I hand you a specification of the
electromagnetic potential everywhere at some time t. To figure out the po-
tential that should result at some t 0 (either before or later), you would
naturally seek a solution of the theory that obeys Maxwell’s equations,
which codify the known laws of electromagnetism. Then you would check
what value the potential takes on at t 0 . The problem is that there are infinitely
many distinct solutions to the equations, each with a different potential at t 0 .
These solutions are all empirically equivalent, so usually we ignore the dif-
ferences between them. But if the potential is a fundamental quantity, we had
better stop ignoring such differences — and we are left with a bizarre sort of
unobservable indeterminism.
This argument has been around for some time, but Healey backs it up with
a new, entirely original argument. He shows that if one accepts some plaus-
ible assumptions of David Lewis’s account of how theoretical terms refer, it is
impossible for us to construct terms that refer to values of the unobservable
potential. Thus, even if the interpretations Healey opposes are correct, the
fundamental physical facts according to these interpretations cannot be ex-
pressed in any of our theories.
Healey thinks we can do better, by taking the third of the three options I
mentioned. He offers an ontology for electromagnetism and other gauge

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 Book Reviews 493

theories that he calls the ‘holonomy interpretation’. The distinguishing fea-

ture of this interpretation is its holism: rather than being localized at points,
the fundamental physical quantities inhere in closed loop-shaped regions of
spacetime. These properties do not generally supervene on the features of the
points making up the loops.
All this has so far been restricted to classical gauge theories. Healey goes on
in the second half of his book to discuss the technical difficulties and onto-
logical prospects of quantum gauge theories. I am afraid these four chapters
will resist comprehension by non-specialists, but for the specialist community

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they will prove invaluable. (The rest of my review will probably elude the
non-specialist, too, for which I apologize.)
That said, the question of how to quantize gauge theories is so deeply vexed
that, inevitably, a few important approaches are ignored. Where possible,
Healey is careful to work within the framework of algebraic quantum field
theory — a decision I applaud given the unique mathematical precision of
this approach compared with other forms of quantum field theory. But he is
not always clear about the tension that exists between this approach and some
of the quantization schemes he discusses. For instance, he begins by discuss-
ing quantization that involves gauge-fixing (that is, imposing a deterministic
equation of motion on the potential). This otherwise-excellent discussion
neglects the fact that research by Franco Strocchi has shown that these
forms of quantization, at least in the standard textbook form which Healey
presents, are incompatible with the algebraic approach. Gauge-fixing meth-
ods are widely employed, and I do not think they should either be omitted or
quickly dismissed from a discussion like this. But Healey’s book would have
benefited from some discussion of the alternatives to the algebraic approach
(e.g. effective field theories), which are currently needed to make sense of
methods like gauge-fixing.
Readers interested in alternatives to the quantization schemes discussed by
Healey should look in two places. The major approach he leaves out (perhaps
because it involves a discrete picture of spacetime) is lattice gauge theory.
Thorough discussions can be found in any number of textbooks. The other,
far less well known scheme is one due to W. Thirring and N. Narnhofer (see
their ‘Covariant QED without Indefinite Metric’, Reviews In Mathematical
Physics, 4 (Special Issue), 1992, pp. 197–211). These authors suggest a way
around the no-go theorems of Strocchi, by proposing an algebraic gauge
quantum field theory that employs non-separable Hilbert spaces. This
approach has the interesting consequence that the potential is not even
defined as a physical quantity on the resulting quantum field theory, laying
to rest (if correct) the dispute about whether the potential is physically real.
But it is far from clear that Thirring and Narnhofer’s approach will bear fruit,
any more than the many alternatives discussed by Healey. I am mainly thank-
ful that our author treats quantum gauge theory the way it ought to be

Mind, Vol. 119 . 474 . April 2010 ß Mind Association 2010

494 Book Reviews

treated — as an open question. He can be forgiven for overlooking a couple of

the many possible answers.

Department of Philosophy DAVID JOHN BAKER

University of Michigan
doi:10.1093/mind/fzq029 Advance Access publication 23 June 2010

From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy,

Downloaded from http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universiteit van Amsterdam on May 6, 2015

by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. ix + 218.
H/b £30.00.
From Empedocles to Wittgenstein contains essays that focus on, or draw
their inspiration from, problems from the history of philosophy. Aristotle,
Aquinas, and Wittgenstein predominate, but Descartes, Kant, Frege, and Ryle
make appearances as well. Many of these essays have been published before,
so Kenny did not intend them to be units of a single volume. Nevertheless, it
is not hard to find unifying issues: What explains the origin of the universe?
What are the right (and wrong) ways of conducting scholarship in the history
of philosophy? What principles govern the rationality of assent and commit-
ment to a system of thought? The reader does not have to be steeped in
Aristotle, Aquinas, or Wittgenstein to appreciate Kenny’s thoughtful treat-
ments. However, because they often revisit his earlier works, this volume is
best taken not as an introduction to Kenny’s work in the history of philoso-
phy but as an appendix to it, a digestif rather than an aperitif. For someone
familiar with Kenny’s prior work, reading this book, with its easy, conversa-
tional style, has the feel of sitting down with him for an engaging philosoph-
ical conversation.
The essay most likely to strike readers as a curious misfit for this volume is
‘Life after Etna: Empedocles in Prose and Poetry’, which at first appears to be
an odd cross between a Sorabjian and a Borgesian treatment, not of
Empedocles’ philosophy, but of the legacy of his death over sixteen centuries.
Legend has it that he threw himself into the crater of Etna, perhaps because he
wanted to convince his followers that the time of his apotheosis had finally
come. Greek historians, after all, reported tales of his miraculous feats, and in
one fragment he claims for himself the ability to bring back from Hades the
‘energy’ of those who have died. However, in Matthew Arnold’s masterpiece
Empedocles on Etna, to which Kenny devotes eleven of this essay’s fifteen
pages, it is Empedocles himself who scorns the popular notion that he has
any such occult knowledge. When his associate Pausanias quizzes him about
curing death trances and cleansing poisonous rivers, Empedocles, in the spirit
of Lucretius, replies that the knowledge he has to give concerns how to look
upon such sights without dismay. We are not gods; we are not even kings
in this world, able to mold it to our wills. We are rather strangers here.

Mind, Vol. 119 . 474 . April 2010 ß Mind Association 2010