at meets the standards of simplicity and informational content. This reflection opens up the way for another strategy that can be dubbed *alternative theory strategy*: instead of endorsing physical theories as they stand – such as Newtonian mechanics – and refusing to read ontological commitments off from their formalisms, one constructs alternative physical theories whose formal apparatus stays as close as possible to the ontology of there being only distance relations among point particles and their change and that matches the standard theories in their testable empirical predictions. In a nutshell, this strategy consists in *building a relationalist physical theory on a relationalist ontology*.

It is important to be clear about what the alternative theory strategy can achieve and what it cannot achieve: even if the ontology is exhausted by distance relations individuating matter points and the change of these relations, when it comes to formulating a dynamical law capturing that change, further dynamical parameters have to be introduced for the reason given above. Consequently, the alternative theory strategy has to admit dynamical parameters such as mass, constants of nature, initial momenta, etc. and cannot but resort to the Humean strategy in order to ban these parameters from the ontology. However, when it comes to space and time, the aim of this strategy is to avoid quantities that are tied to absolute space and time, such as empty space-time points, absolute velocities, absolute accelerations, or absolute rotations. As regards classical mechanics, the alternative theory strategy goes back at least to [@Mach:1919aa]. In the last three decades, it has been quite exhaustively worked out by Julian Barbour and collaborators (see [@Barbour:1982aa], for the seminal paper that laid down the “best-matching” framework). Furthermore, @Belot:1999aa and @Saunders:2013aa have also proposed each a relationalist theory of classical mechanics.

Let us discuss Belot’s proposal first (see also [@Pooley:2002aa], 