Fundamental physical ontologies and the constraint of empirical coherence: a defense of wave function realism

Arkady Plotnitsky, Andrei Yu. Khrennikov

Vera Matarese

The paper explores a particular line of objection against wave-function realism. This view, advocated by Bell (1987) and presently defended by Albert (1996), North (2013) and Ney (2016), claims that the quantum wave function is a high-dimensional physical field. Normally, wave-function realism has been criticized for its ontological commitments, which are regarded as empirically unsupportable in principle and as violating empirical coherence. In this paper, I investigate whether there are any methodological arguments for endorsing such an ontology and whether they are sound. In particular, I home in on and discuss three arguments that may be used to support wave-function realism: (i) the argument from laws; (ii) the argument from the complete information of the system; (iii) the argument from explanation. My conclusion is that these arguments do not provide any good methodological grounds for inferring the existence of a high-dimensional physical field from quantum theory.

Ignacio Rojas

The aim of this work is to study the ontological thesis defended by Ontic Structural Realism, which, in general, states that the ontological commitments should be focused in the relations and not on objects. This would be a more coherent realist stance towards modern physical theories. In first place we will study the ontological conception defended by the Ontic Structural Realism, which, broadly speaking, postulates that the ontological focus should be placed on relations rather than on objects. This, in turn, would constitute a realistic interpretation of the current physical theories. Secondly, as a possible defense to the position stated by Ontic Structural Realism, the concept of non-supervenient relations will be studied and it will be argued that it is this type of relations that acquires a fundamental character in Quantum Mechanics, as, for example, in phenomena such as the so-called quantum entanglement.

Paolo Pecere

Quentin Ruyant

Primitive ontology is a program which seeks to make explicit the ontological commitments of physical theories in terms of a distribution of matter in ordinary space-time. This program targets wave-function realism, which interprets the high-dimensional configuration space on which wave-functions are defined as our fundamental physical space. Wave-function realism allegedly fails to account for a correspondence between the ontology it postulates and the ‘manifest image’ of the world in which experimental tests of the theory are performed, and therefore the wave-function must be completed with an additional structure which describes what fundamentally exists in ordinary space-time: the ‘primitive ontol- ogy’. However primitive ontologies face some difficulties, in particular concerning the ontological status of the wave-function. In this paper, I defend a realist inter- pretation of the wave-function as describing objects in ordinary space-time, which does not require supplementing the theory with additional structure. The main dif- ference between this proposal and other primitive ontology proposals is that the fundamental constituents of reality are not conceived of as localised objects, but as primitive relations. This interpretation purports to share the advantages of both wave-function realism and primitive ontologies without facing the same difficulties. I argue that the need for an additional structure stems from a commitment to the locality of the fundamental constituents of reality, and that such commitment is unnecessary for recovering the manifest image of the world.