A standard line in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that physical theories are equivalent only when they agree on their empirical content, where this empirical content is often understood as being encoded in the equations of motion of those theories. In this article, we question whether it is indeed the case that the empirical content of a theory is exhausted by its equations of motion, showing that (for example) considerations of boundary conditions play a key role in the empirical equivalence (or otherwise) of theories. Having argued for this, we show that philosophical claims made by Weatherall (2016) that electromagnetism in the Faraday tensor formalism is equivalent to electromagnetism in the vector potential formalism, and by Knox (2011) that general relativity is equivalent to teleparallel gravity, can both be called into question. We then show that properly considering the role of boundary conditions in theory structure can potentially restore these claims of equivalence and close with some remarks on the pragmatics of adjudications on theory identity.

当代哲学文献中的一条标准路线是，只有当物理理论在其经验内容上达成一致时，它们才是等价的，而这种经验内容通常被理解为编码在这些理论的运动方程中。在本文中，我们质疑理论的经验内容是否确实被其运动方程耗尽，这表明（例如）边界条件的考虑在经验等价（或其他）中发挥着关键作用理论。对此进行论证后，我们证明，Weatherall（2016）提出的哲学主张（即法拉第张量形式主义中的电磁学等同于矢量势形式主义中的电磁学）以及诺克斯（Knox（2011））提出的广义相对论等同于远平行引力，两者都可以受到质疑。然后，我们表明，正确考虑边界条件在理论结构中的作用可以潜在地恢复这些等价性主张，并通过对理论同一性裁决的实用性的一些评论来结束。