How real is the quantum?
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How real is the quantum? S. French and J. Saatsi (eds.): Scientific realism and the quantum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 320 pp, $80.00 HB Jonathan Bain1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This thought-provoking collection of 14 essays addresses two questions: 1. What morals can be drawn from quantum physics for the debate over scientific realism? 2. How can one be a scientific realist with respect to quantum physics? The essays are organized into five parts. Parts I and V, “Rethinking Scientific Realism,” and “Quantum Field Theory and Realism,” address the first question, while Parts II, III, and IV, “Underdetermination and Interpretation,” “Pragmatism,” and “Wavefunction and Quantum State Realism,” address the second question. In Part I, Carl Hoefer, in “Scientific Realism without the Quantum,” and Juha Saatsi, in “Truth vs. Progress Realism about Spin,” defend versions of selective realism, which enjoins us to believe in those aspects of a successful theory that are responsible for its success. In Hoefer’s version, these aspects are “those parts of contemporary science that can no longer be reasonably doubted” (24). In Saatsi’s version, they are notions “so thoroughly entrenched in different theories and technologies that we cannot really conceive of science as successful as ours without [them]” (41). For Hoefer, this excludes “fundamental physics,” including quantum mechanics, and this is due to an underdetermination of realist interpretations (26). For Saatsi, on the other hand, a primary example of an entrenched notion is the property of spin, which he takes to be inherently quantum mechanical. One concern with both versions is the subjective nature of their criteria for epistemic warrant. To a practitioner of normal science, it may be difficult to reasonably doubt a classical electromagnetic account of meso-level electric phenomena, say, but not, perhaps, to an Einstein willing to take imaginative conceptual leaps. Similarly, one can imagine scenarios in which even the most deeply entrenched properties are reconceived beyond recognition. * Jonathan Bain [email protected] 1
Department of Technology, Culture and Society, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA
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Metascience
In Part II, Craig Callender asks “Can We Quarantine the Quantum Blight,” and after canvassing the options—Bohm’s theory, collapse theories, Everett, and hybrids thereof—answers no: underdetermination is a genuine problem. In “On the Plurality of Quantum Theories,” David Wallace suggests the answer is yes: what philosophers call “quantum theory” is really a theoretical framework within which individual quantum theories can be expressed, and only the Everettian interpretation is compatible with this insofar as only it is neutral with respect to ontology. In “Naturalism and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” J. E. Wolff is concerned with a slightly tangential issue; namely, whether the project of interpretation is compatible with naturalism. This should interest realists inso
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