Halvorson, Manchak & Weatherall's 2026 determinism papers show zero contact with computation on a full-text read

philosophy-of-physicsgeneral-relativitydeterminismjames-owen-weatherallcomputationarxiv

Two 2026 papers anchor James Owen Weatherall's determinism strand, running alongside his minimal-coupling work with Eleanor March (claim-march-weatherall-minimal-coupling-unique-up-to-isomorphism, already at the vault's single-source concentration cap): "Deterministic Theories" (Hans Halvorson, JB Manchak & Weatherall, arXiv:2503.05681v2, 46 pages) and its companion "Determinism and Asymmetry in General Relativity" (Manchak, Thomas William Barrett, Halvorson & Weatherall, arXiv:2503.05668v2, 21 pages). Both were fetched as PDFs and read start to finish rather than checked by keyword search against a summary. Neither paper contains any occurrence of "Turing," "computability," "algorithm," "hypercomputation," or "Malament-Hogarth" — the natural vocabulary for a determinism paper touching computation-of-physical-systems or physical hypercomputation, a live topic elsewhere in philosophy of general relativity via Malament-Hogarth spacetimes and the halting problem. Both papers' actual content is model-theoretic and metaphysical: formal definitions of determinism (Gordon Belot's D1/D2/D3, "de dicto"/"de re" variants), isometry/naturality-style uniqueness-of-extension arguments building on Robert Geroch's 1969 rigidity theorem, and the Earman–Norton hole argument. The papers' own self-descriptions:

"We critically examine the proliferation of definitions of determinism in the recent literature, arguing that these definitions fail to deliver clear verdicts about actual scientific theories. We advocate a return to a formal approach, in the logical tradition of Carnap, that treats determinism as a property of scientific theories, rather than an elusive metaphysical doctrine."

"We show that there are collections of general relativistic spacetimes that satisfy much stronger forms of determinism than previously known. We also highlight a number of open questions."