A key role that naturalness plays in particle physics is the narrowing of focus and the status elevation of speculative theories. There are several ways a speculative theory's status can be elevated, including the assessment that it is more likely than other speculative theories. It is argued that naturalness claims on speculative theories are just those -- claims that natural theories are...
I consider four reasons to adopt the criterion of naturalness in the context of effective field theories (EFTs) of fundamental phenomena, the first three less compelling than the fourth. The first three are (i) naturalness has had modest empirical success, (ii) it can be quantified, and (iii) it is consistent with an image of EFTs that is underwritten by what Williams (2015) calls a "central...
My aim will be to distinguish two notions of naturalness in use in BSM physics. One way of understanding naturalness is as a prohibition on sensitive dependencies of a theory's description of low-energy physics on details of the theory's description of high-energy physics. I will argue that considerations from the general structure of effective field theory provide motivation for this notion...
