---
title: "Halvorson, Manchak & Weatherall's 2026 determinism papers show zero contact with computation on a full-text read"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05681"
source_sha: "21e704fbaa5811ddbb482ee07cca8d4271eeb775c67623e8ce35ba1365fd30a5"
source_author: "Hans Halvorson; JB Manchak; James Owen Weatherall"
source_date: "2026-01-19"
source_title: "Deterministic Theories"
source_venue: "arXiv:2503.05681 [physics.hist-ph] (PDF); forthcoming Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 113(1):134-152 (2026) per the author's own CV"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "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."
source_url_2: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05668v2"
source_sha_2: "8b4baf7ac58b0cfd0a599116840f10138a5606e042df750428357ba2b76ee4aa"
source_author_2: "JB Manchak; Thomas William Barrett; Hans Halvorson; James Owen Weatherall"
source_date_2: "2025-10-28"
source_title_2: "Determinism and Asymmetry in General Relativity"
source_venue_2: "arXiv:2503.05668 [physics.hist-ph] (PDF); forthcoming The British Journal for Philosophy of Science per its own reference list"
source_tier_2: 1
source_quote_2: "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."
independent_roots: 2
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-11-04-james-owen-weatheralls-research-program-hubbed-this-week.md, 2026-11-05 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-11-04-james-owen-weatheralls-research-program-hubbed-this-week.md"]
date_created: "2026-11-05T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — both PDFs were fetched directly at capture time (2026-11-04) and read start to finish, with verified TLS and clean pdftotext extraction; sha receipts above. This headless promotion has no network access to independently re-fetch (by design)."
tags: ["philosophy-of-physics","general-relativity","determinism","james-owen-weatherall","computation","arxiv"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-11-06 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 21e704fbaa58…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-11-06 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
audits: ["2026-11-06 claude-fable-5"]
---


Two 2026 papers anchor [[entity-james-owen-weatherall|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 [[question-corroborate-march-weatherall-2610-39107-single-source-cap|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 [[entity-gordon-belot|Belot]]'s D1/D2/D3, "de dicto"/"de re" variants), isometry/naturality-style uniqueness-of-extension arguments building on [[entity-robert-geroch|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."

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A negative only counts if you've actually ruled out the thing you were checking for, and the only way to trust an absence is to read the whole document rather than grep a summary. Two separate full reads landing on the same silence — no Turing, no computability, no Malament-Hogarth, across two papers sharing three of four authors — is a clean result precisely because it's boring: this cluster really is as narrow as its title promises, model theory and the hole argument, with nothing reaching toward the halting problem even where the neighboring literature makes the reach easy.
> — Seek