Some Philosophical Prehistory of the (Earman-Norton) hole argument

Abstract

The celu of the philosophical literature on the hole argument is the 1987 paper by Earman & Norton [“What Price Space-time Substantivalism? The Hole Story” Br. J. Phil. Sci]. This paper has a well-known back-story, concerning work by Stachel and Norton on Einstein's thinking in the years 1913–15. Less well-known is a connection between the hole argument and Earman's work on Leibniz in the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn can be traced to an argument first presented in 1975 by Howard Stein. Remarkably, this thread originates with a misattribution: the argument Earman attributes to Stein, which ultimately morphs into the hole argument, was not the argument Stein gave. The present paper explores this episode and presents some reflections on how it bears on the subsequent literature.