Lawrence Sklar

Mathematical physics works by representing the contents of the world and the world’s dynamical changes by the components of some mathematical structure and the transformations one can impose on these components. Quite rightly, philosophers of science have concentrated much attention on trying to understand how physicists arrive at the appropriate transformational rules to represent dynamical evolution in the world, that is, on how they find the correct laws of nature. But the preliminary problem, how to choose the appropriate mathematical representatives for the things of the world and their states of being, has received, perhaps, less attention than it deserves.