 However, contemporary scholarship has shown that Einstein’s remarks here were but elliptical references to an argument (the so-called “Hole Argument”) that has only fully been reconstructed from his private correspondence. Its conclusion is that, if a theory is generally covariant, the bare points of the spacetime manifold can have no inherent primitive identity (inherited say, from the manifold’s underlying topology), and so no reality independent of, in particular, the value of the metrical field associated with each point by a particular solution of the Einstein field equations (Stachel 1980; Norton 1984, 1993). Thus for a generally covariant theory, no physical reality accrues to “empty space” in the absence of any physical fields. In Einstein’s rhetorical embellishment, general covariance “takes away from space and time the last remnant of physical objectivity”; what he should have said is that spacetime coordinates are nothing more than arbitrary labels or parameters for the identification of physical events [see entry on  the hole argument].  Hence this passage is not really an endorsement of positivist phenomenalism.