Good VIBES only

How to articulate the common ontological commitments of symmetry-related models of physical theories? This is a central (perhaps the central) question in the philosophical literature on symmetry transformations in physics; recently, Dewar (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 70, 2019) has proposed a strategy for answering this question which goes by the name of ‘external sophistication’. And yet: this strategy has been accused of being hopelessly obscure by, among others, Martens and Read (Synthese, 199, 2020). In this article, I demonstrate that not all cases of external sophistication are subject to this charge—for reasons which will become clear, the cases for which this is not so give us what I’ll call ‘good VIBES’. Having established this, I then go on to consider good VIBES in the context of the analysis of hidden symmetries, in dialogue with recent work on that topic by Bielińska and Jacobs (2024).