Howard, Frederik, lists,
Howard, you wrote:
there */is/*//general agreement that QM cannot be interpreted by
Peircean Realism. In fact, most teachers of QM struggle with the
intuitively realist perspectives of introductory students. In
teaching QM, Realism blocks the path of inquiry.
[End quote]
It's hard to see how there can be general agreement, at least among
physicists, about QM's being uninterpretable by Peircean Realism when
most physicists are not well acquainted with Peircean Realism.
Peircean realism favors real, in-principle uncertainty and vagueness in
nature itself, by reason of the imperfectibility of measurement, I.e.,
that which, even _/in principle/_, inquirers could never find, nature
itself cannot find. Peirce bases tychism and synechism in realism and
ultimately in fallibilism.
See "Fallibilism, Continuity, and Evolution"
http://www.textlog.de/4248.html (CP 1.141-175).
It involves an application of his idea that the real is only the object
of a true proposition. The idea is that, if there is no true proposition
to be formulated stating the exact quantities in a physical event, then
there aren't such exact quantities in such physical event. While that
idea does not entail Heisenberg's rather more specific uncertainty
principle, it seems compatible with it. Peircean realism is not
classical physical realism that assumes that every particle has fully
determinate mechanical quantities at every instant.
Moreover, Peirce's realism includes the idea that there are real
individuals, real existences. (So the 'complementarity' of generalism
versus individualism is already encompassed in Peirce's brand of
realism.) In particular, Peirce regards individual existence as a matter
not merely of location or proximity in space and time, but of reaction,
resistance, interaction, like so many natural measurements. This is
congenial to the QM view of things as becoming determinate through
interaction with the environment, the 'observer', the 'measurer', etc.
If one holds with basicness of reaction/resistance for individual
existence, and with the indeterminacy of the future, and takes into
account similar considerations involving a signal speed limit (the light
cone etc.), then QM starts to seem more a solution than a problem.
Best, Ben
On 11/7/2014 9:17 PM, Howard Pattee wrote:
At 09:08 AM 11/7/2014, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
I am not sure. Much of the yet unresolved discussion of QM have to do
with deciding which ontological commitments come with the Schrödinger
equation. As far as I have understood, there is no scientific
agreement about this. . .
HP: That is true, and you mention several "unnatural" epistemologies;
but there */is/*//general agreement that QM cannot be interpreted by
Peircean Realism. In fact, most teachers of QM struggle with the
intuitively realist perspectives of introductory students. In teaching
QM, Realism blocks the path of inquiry.
FS: . . .(unlike basic knowledge about iron and cakes etc.)
HP: This assumption appears to beg the general question. Is there
agreement about how "basic knowledge" relates to reality?
FS: But this [QM ambiguity] is not generalizable to the idea that all
scientific knowledge is subject to the same ambiguity.
HP: I'm not sure what you are implying. Are you agreeing with me that
different types of knowledge benefit from different epistemologies? Or
do you only mean that ambiguities in classical models are different
ambiguities from those in QM? (I assume you don't mean there are no
ambiguities or that Peirce has spoken, the case is closed.)
Howard
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