About Quantum Mind and Social Science. Unifying Physical and Social Ontology

Henry Pierce Stapp

Badredine Arfi

A key claim that Alexander Wendt makes in his book Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology is that he is not using the 'quantum' as a metaphor.Nor is he drawing analogies either.He argues that he is constructing a quantum theory of the human subject and social structures through a quantum-theoretic explanation of consciousness undergirded by a panpsychist hypothesis of primitive protoconsciousness.In this article I show how Wendt's insistence that he is developing a literally-speaking quantum-theoretic approach presents him with a number of must-notignore challenges that originate in quantum theory.I specifically discuss three challenges

Bentley B. Allan

Alexander E. Wendt

There is an underlying assumption in the social sciences that consciousness and social life are ultimately classical physical/material phenomena. In this ground-breaking book, Alexander Wendt challenges this assumption by proposing that consciousness is, in fact, a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon. In the first half of the book, Wendt justifies the insertion of quantum theory into social scientific debates, introduces social scientists to quantum theory and the philosophical controversy about its interpretation, and then defends the quantum consciousness hypothesis against the orthodox, classical approach to the mind-body problem. In the second half, he develops the implications of this metaphysical perspective for the nature of language and the agent-structure problem in social ontology. Wendt's argument is a revolutionary development which raises fundamental questions about the nature of social life and the work of those who study it.

Patrick A. Heelan

Quantum mechanics is interpreted, in the spirit of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, as about physical objects in so far as these are revealed by and within the local, social, and historical process of measurement. An analysis of the hermeneutical aspect of quantum mechanical measurement reveals close analogues with the hermeneutical social/historical sciences. The hermeneutical analysis of science requires the move from the epistemological attitude to an ontological one.