Determinism and Indeterminism as Model Artefacts: Toward a Model-Invariant Ontology of Physics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model-invariant ontological framework for physics, emphasizing structural features stable across equivalent models, and challenges traditional views on determinism and indeterminism as representational artifacts.

Contribution

It introduces a criterion for ontological commitment based on model-invariance, promoting a fallibilist structural realism grounded in stable features across representations.

Findings

Structural features like conservation laws are invariant and realist.

Modal selection features are gauge choices, not ontological.

Framework clarifies foundational issues like the measurement problem.

Abstract

This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in principle, and arise in a non-contrived way in many scientifically important models. When dynamical systems admit mathematically equivalent deterministic and stochastic formulations, their observable predictions depend only on the induced structure of correlations between preparations and measurement outcomes. I use this model-equivalence to motivate a model-invariance criterion for ontological commitment, according to which only structural features that remain stable across empirically equivalent representations, and whose physical effects are invariant under such reformulations, are candidates for realism. This yields a fallibilist form of structural realism grounded in modal robustness rather than in the specifics of any given mathematical representation. Features such as conservation laws, symmetries, and causal or metric structure satisfy this criterion and can be encoded in observable relations in mathematically intelligible ways. By contrast, the localisation of modal selection -- whether in initial conditions, stochastic outcomes, or informational collapse mechanisms -- is not invariant under empirically equivalent reformulations and is therefore best understood as a gauge choice rather than an ontological feature. The resulting framework explains how certain long-standing problems in the foundations of physics, including the measurement problem and the perceived conflict between physical determinism and free agency, arise from the reification of representational artefacts. By distinguishing model-invariant structure from modelling conventions, I offer a realist ontology for modern physics that combines empirical openness with resistance to metaphysical overreach.