 One approach to investigating the limits of an ontological stance with respect to symmetries would be to investigate their empirical or observational status: can the symmetries in question be directly observed? We first have to address what it means for a symmetry to be observable, and indeed whether all symmetries have the same observational status. Kosso (2000) arrives at the conclusion that there are important differences in the empirical status of the different kinds of symmetries. In particular, while global continuous symmetries can be directly observed — via such experiments as the Galilean ship experiment — a local continuous symmetry can have only indirect empirical evidence. Brading and Brown (2004) argue for a different interpretation of Kosso’s  examples,[20]  but agree with Kosso’s assessment that local symmetry transformations cannot exhibit an analogue of the Galileo’s Ship Experiment. Against this view, Greaves and Wallace (2014) and Teh (2016) have recently argued that when suitably understood, local symmetries can indeed have direct empirical significance (their argument turns on the possibility of using asymptotically non-trivial local symmetries to construct Galileo’s Ship scenarios for certain systems). In particular, Teh (2016) argues that this phenomenon is responsible for the empirically significant symmetries of topological soliton solutions. On the other hand, Friederich (2015) contends that on one plausible axiomatization of the schema introduced by Greaves and Wallace, it is possible to deduce that local symmetries do not have direct empirical significance.