Related papers: Quantum epistemology and constructivism
Constructivists (and intuitionists in general) asked what kind of mental construction is needed to convince ourselves (and others) that some mathematical statement is true. This question has a much more practical (and even cynical)…
Quantum mechanics has been subject to logical scrutiny since its inception. The behavior of quantum systems, which are fundamentally dissimilar from classical systems, often appears to point to a logical inconsistency in quantum mechanics,…
We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…
We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
No theory of physics has been collectively scientifically verified in an experiment so far. It is pointed out that probabilistic structure of quantum theory can be collectively scientifically verified in an experiment. It is also argued…
It is shown that the basic equations of quantum theory can be obtained from a straightforward application of logical inference to experiments for which there is uncertainty about individual events and for which the frequencies of the…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
The epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics is still in an unacceptable status. This becomes obvious if looking on the variety of interpretations currently under discussion. However, the physical community together with…
The (consistent or decoherent) histories interpretation provides a consistent realistic ontology for quantum mechanics, based on two main ideas. First, a logic (system of reasoning) is employed which is compatible with the Hilbert-space…
We present a theory of information expressed solely in terms of which transformations of physical systems are possible and which are impossible - i.e. in constructor-theoretic terms. Although it includes conjectured laws of physics that are…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…
We look into the ontology of quantum theory as distinct from that of the classical theory in the sciences, following a broadly Kantian tradition and distinguishing between the noumenal and phenomenal realities where the former is…
The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief. The bulk of contemporary epistemology has focused primarily on that task of justification. Truth seems to be a quite obvious criterion-does the belief in question correspond…
We begin by surveying the historical positions in different attempts to understand the material world since the rise of modern science, with specific focus on the role of Cartesian primary qualities in explanatory conceptualisation.…
The operational axiomatization of quantum theory can be regarded as a set of six epistemological rules for falsifying propositions of the theory. In particular, the Purification postulate-the only one that is not shared with classical…
A probabilistic propositional logic, endowed with an epistemic component for asserting (non-)compatibility of diagonizable and bounded observables, is presented and illustrated for reasoning about the random results of projective…
We ask whether the operational quantum description is complete at the level of preparations: can the empirically accessible properties of a finite preparation set be reproduced exactly by a hidden-variable description, or must every such…