Cordero, Alberto
(2024)
Realism Despite Underdetermination.
In: UNSPECIFIED.
Abstract
Recent arguments for the physicality of pure quantum states revive ontic interpretations of the wave function. The resulting proposals describe radically different worlds and make divergent predictions but not experimentally accessible ones as the technology stands—in effective terms, the interpretations are empirically equivalent, ruining the prospects of realist interpretation. One response, Partial Realism (PR), limits commitment to theoretical convergences at intermediate theoretical descriptive levels. PR looks for shared theoretical claims among the competing programs, In the quantum mechanical case, it looks for shared theoretical claims among the competing programs about, e.g., the psi state, micro-spatial structures, and the Bohr model. However, critics (notably Callender 2020) object that the common contents identified are meager. The objections include that the quantum state is the same only approximately; the shared micro-spatial structures hailed by realists are not quantum results and thus cannot help PR; the same goes for theoretical parts such as the orbits derived from Bohr’s model, which rest on semiclassical theories; also raised are qualms about Bohmian realist accounts of reflection/transmission coefficients in the tunneling effect. Results such as these lead Callender to dismiss the PR strategy. This paper challenges his arguments and defends the strategy.
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