In this paper, I critically assess two recent proposals for an interpretation-independent understanding of non-relativistic quantum mechanics: the overlap strategy (Fraser & Vickers, 2022 ) and the textbook account (Egg, 2021 ). My argument has three steps. I first argue that they presume a Quinean-Carnapian meta-ontological framework that yields flat, structureless ontologies. Second, such ontologies are unable to solve the problems that quantum ontologists want to solve. Finally, only structured ontologies are capable of solving the problems that quantum ontologists want (...) to solve. But they require some dose of speculation. In the end, I defend the conservative way to do quantum ontology, which is (and must be) speculative and non-neutral. (shrink)

When young Kant meditated upon the distinction between his right and left hands, he could not foresee that the problem of incongruent counterparts would revive in the twentieth century under a new form. In the early days of quantum chemistry, Friedrich Hund developed the so-called Hund paradox that arises from the supposed inability of quantum mechanics to account for the difference between enantiomers. In this paper, the paradox is expressed as a case of quantum measurement, stressing that decoherence does not (...) offer a way out of the problem. The main purpose is to argue for the need to adopt a clear interpretation of quantum mechanics in order to solve the paradox. In particular, I claim that the Modal-Hamiltonian Interpretation, which conceives measurement as a breaking-symmetry process, supplies the tools required to explain the dextro-rotation or levo-rotation properties of optical isomers. (shrink)

Two recent papers appeared in FOOP disagree regarding the role played by decoherence in quantum physics. On the one hand, Elise Crull considers that decoherence, by itself, solves many conceptual problems in quantum physics, with no need of interpretative considerations. On the other hand, Antonio Vassallo and Michael Esfeld reply by correctly claiming that, although decoherence is a powerful tool to deal with conceptual problems, it does not dispense us from interpreting the formalism. In this brief note we want to (...) contribute to the debate with further considerations from another viewpoint. In this work we show that the discussions "decoherence versus interpretation" revolve around whether the theory of decoherence requires interpretive considerations to solve the measurement problem. In general, those discussions take the theory of decoherence for granted, as if it would not involve any difficulty. Therefore, they commonly focus on the "interpretation" wing: even in the case that the open system decoheres in a given basis, the whole closed system is still in a superposition and, thus, without an adequate interpretation, it cannot be said that the observables defined by that basis behave classically. Here we have focused on the "decoherence" wing: given the conceptual challenges that the theory must face and the alternative approaches to the orthodox view, the understanding of the very phenomenon of decoherence still requires a great deal of interpretive work. (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.

We discuss the hypothesis that the debate about the interpretation of the orthodox formalism of quantum mechanics might have been misguided right from the start by a biased metaphysical interpretation of the formalism and its inner mathematical relations. In particular, we focus on the orthodox interpretation of the congruence relation, '=', which relates equivalent classes of different mathematical representations of a vector in Hilbert space, in terms of metaphysical identity. We will argue that this seemingly "common sense" interpretation, at the (...) semantic level, has severe difficulties when considering the syntactic level of the theory. (shrink)