ABSTRACT
Questions about the structure of space are pressing in both metaphysics and the philosophy of physics. While metaphysicians normally consider alternative conceptions of space and investigate their metaphysical coherence, philosophers of physics usually infer the characterization of space from physical theories. In this paper, I will bridge these two approaches by proposing a particular model of space derived from Loop Quantum Gravity as a promising starting point for developing a metaphysical characterization of discrete space. This model, which is analogous to the one proposed in Vassallo and Esfeld (2014) within a Bohmian approach to quantum gravity, features at the fundamental level a variety of chunks of space, understood as concrete atoms, which differ from one another with regard to their shapes and number of adjacency relations. It vindicates the physical salience of recent standard atomistic discrete models of space that have been developed to escape Weyl’s famous tile argument, and provides metaphysicians, I argue, with a new, physically grounded form of atomistic discrete space that is worth investigating.
