Can the neo-Aristotelian uphold a pluralist substance ontology while taking seriously the recent arguments in favour of monism based on quantum holism and other arguments from quantum mechanics? In this article, Jonathan Schaffer’s priority monism will be the main target. It will be argued that the case from quantum mechanics in favour of priority monism does face some challenges. Moreover, if the neo-Aristotelian is willing to consider alternative ways to understand ‘substance’, there may yet be hope for a pluralist substance (...) ontology. A speculative case for such an ontology will be constructed based on primitive incompatibility. (shrink)

Recently I published an article in this journal entitled “Less interpretation and more decoherence in quantum gravity and inflationary cosmology” :1019–1045, 2015). This article generated responses from three pairs of authors: Vassallo and Esfeld :1533–1536, 2015), Okon and Sudarsky :852–879, 2016) and Fortin and Lombardi. In what follows, I reply to the criticisms raised by these authors.

I argue that quantum decoherence—understood as a dynamical process entailed by the standard formalism alone—carries us beyond conceptual aspects of non-relativistic quantum mechanics deemed insurmountable by many contributors to the recent quantum gravity and cosmology literature. These aspects include various incarnations of the measurement problem and of the quantum -to-classical puzzle. Not only can such problems be largely bypassed or dissolved without default to a particular interpretation, but theoretical work in relativistic arenas stands to gain substantial physical and philosophical insight (...) by incorporating decoherence phenomena. (shrink)