Related papers: Antirealism in sheep's clothing: Wave function rea…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
Traditionally, to be a realist about something means believing in the independent existence of that something. In this line of thought, a scientific realist is someone who believes in the objective existence of the entities postulated by…
Realism -- the idea that the concepts in physical theories refer to 'things' existing in the real world -- is introduced as a tool to analyze the status of the wave-function. Although the physical entities are recognized by the existence of…
This chapter reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology. We begin by situating WFR within the broader debate about the ontology of the quantum state and the temptation to "read off" metaphysics from…
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
The meaning of the wave function has been a hot topic of debate since the early days of quantum mechanics. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in this long-standing question. Is the wave function ontic, directly representing a…
Dualities in physics have challenged traditional forms of scientific realism by undermining the idea that theories describe a unique underlying ontology. In this paper, we develop a new perspective on scientific realism that responds to…
Is the wave function a physical reality traveling through our apparatus? Is it a real wave, or it is only a mathematical tool for calculating probabilities of results of measurements? Different interpretations of the quantum mechanics (QM)…
A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the meaning of quantum mechanics still remains elusive. This is largely due to the puzzling nature of the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. If we are realists about…
Although quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories, there has been a long-standing debate about the interpretation of the wave function---the central object of the theory. Two prominent views are that (i) it…
The text points out that one of the main contradictions of quantum realism, which is particularly relevant to the social sciences, is the tension between the existence of an observer-independent reality and the idea that this reality is…
The main claim of the paper is that one can be 'realist' (in some sense) about quantum mechanics without requiring any form of realism about the wave function. We begin by discussing various forms of realism about the wave function, namely…
Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in detail how we can recover…
The ontological status of the quantum wavefunction remains one of the most debated questions in quantum theory. While epistemic interpretations regard the wavefunction as a reflection of our knowledge or beliefs, ontic interpretations treat…
Much has been discussed in the philosophy of science about how we should understand the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, scientific realists believe that empirically adequate theories can be supplemented by interpretations that can…
In this article we discuss the problem of finding an interpretation of quantum mechanics which provides an objective account of physical reality. In the first place we discuss the problem of interpretation and analyze the importance of such…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
In this paper I review three different positions on the wave function, namely: nomological realism, dispositionalism, and configuration space realism by regarding as essential their capacity to account for the world of our experience. I…
Counterfactual quantum cryptography (CQC) is used here as a tool to assess the status of the quantum state: Is it real/ontic (an objective state of Nature) or epistemic (a state of the observer's knowledge)? In contrast to recent approaches…
In the first part of the paper I argue that an ontology of events is precise, flexible and general enough so as to cover the three main alternative formulations of quantum mechanics as well as theories advocating an antirealistic view of…