Decoherence, appearance, and reality in agential realism

European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (2):1-18 (2023)
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Abstract

This paper reconsiders what implications quantum decoherence has for Karen Barad’s agential realism. In contrast with the recent claim of Thomas Everth and Laura Gurney (2022), this paper argues that decoherence supports rather than defeats the holist, relational ontology of agential realism. Indeed, decoherence offers an explanation for how a quantum system can remain entangled and superposed in principle while it nevertheless in practice appears classical to a local observer. Decoherence shows why the appearance of classicality is not an objection to the ontology being in reality that of agential realism, in accordance with Barad’s repeated insistence that we should not mistake principle for practice. Whether users of agential realism in social theory should be encouraged by this is another matter that this paper does not take a stance on. As an ontology, however, agential realism is vindicated.

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Rasmus Jaksland
University of Copenhagen

Citations of this work

Distinguishing two (unsound) arguments for quantum social science.Rasmus Jaksland - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3):1-21.

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References found in this work

The Ontology of Bohmian Mechanics.M. Esfeld, D. Lazarovici, Mario Hubert & D. Durr - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (4):773-796.
A new look at emergence. Or when after is different.Alexandre Guay & Olivier Sartenaer - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 6 (2):297-322.
The strong emergence of molecular structure.Vanessa A. Seifert - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3):1-25.

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