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Routledge eBooks

Historicized ontology, scientific metaphysics, and philosophy of history

Kefu Zhu

Published Aug 22, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The temporality and a certain degree of perspectivism of the quantum histories interpretation and its formalism seem to have similarities with relational ontology, process ontology, and Leibnizian monadology. This chapter specifically analyzes the relationship, similarities, and differences between these versions of ontologies and the historicized ontology. Then, some issues in the philosophy of history are discussed in the second section. In the philosophy of history, some scholars have borrowed concepts and the worldview of quantum mechanics to understand the ontology of history since the 20th century. However, due to an insufficient understanding of the specific controversies of different interpretations of quantum mechanics, the influence on the philosophy of history often has misunderstandings and biases. From the perspective of quantum histories interpretation and scientific metaphysics, some of these misunderstandings can be reasonably resolved.

DOI
10.4324/9781003662860-7

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The temporality and a certain degree of perspectivism of the quantum histories interpretation and its formalism seem to have similarities with relational ontology, process ontology, and Leibnizian monadology. This chapter specifically analyzes the relationship, similarities, and differences between these versions of ontologies and the historicized ontology. Then, some issues in the philosophy of history are discussed in the second section. In the philosophy of history, some scholars have borrowed concepts and the worldview of quantum mechanics to understand the ontology of history since the 20th century. However, due to an insufficient understanding of the specific controversies of different interpretations of quantum mechanics, the influence on the philosophy of history often has misunderstandings and biases. From the perspective of quantum histories interpretation and scientific metaphysics, some of these misunderstandings can be reasonably resolved.
This book discusses the ontology in the quantum world and argues that it should be interpreted as a historicized ontology. This perspective is advocated by the quantum histories interpretation. Inspired by the nomological interpretation from Bohmian mechanics and the corresponding understanding of the law of nature and logic, the ontology will be useful to solve the difficulties of confusing ontology and perplexing logical inference. Furthermore, this book proposes that the historicized ontology can be generalized to more complicated structures and fit naturally into temporal correlation. Core philosophical issues such as the law of nature, the ontology of events, history, and processes, and the metaphysics of history are coherently discussed, revealing the profound meaning behind the formalism of quantum histories. By providing a new framework for a historicized picture of ontology, it will effectively promote the debates in the philosophy of physics and the fundamental research in quantum mechanics. This book will appeal to scholars and students of the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and quantum theory.
This chapter discusses the ontological and logical issues involved in criticisms. The ontology of quantum histories interpretation is based on two core contents. One is the stochastic evolution dynamics, which is similar to standard quantum mechanics; the other is the reasoning principles (especially the single-framework rule) that must be followed if the quantum process is expressed in the histories formalism, which makes the interpretation deviate from previous rules of classical propositional reasoning. Although in those cases where classical mechanics can be regarded as an approximation of quantum mechanics, the “quantum logic” proposed by histories interpretation is enough to reduce to the classical propositional logic, there are still unresolved challenges regarding the relationship between the new and old logics, the new and old ontologies. In particular, there is a certain anti-realism in the expressions of the founders of the quantum histories interpretation, which causes mutual influence between the characterization of the properties of quantum histories and the logical inference of quantum histories propositions.
To revisit and analyze the histories formalism of quantum mechanics, this chapter will refer to the basic idea of the nomological interpretation of the quantum wave function as described in the previous chapter. The quantum wave functions can be interpreted as nomological and non-ontological elements of Bohmian mechanics. This inspires us that, in quantum histories formalism, the multiple conditions/criteria of determining the possible families of histories, whose validity can be examined by reasonable tests regarding the properties of subsystems, can be argued as lawful or nomological, while the quantum histories can be argued as the fundamental physical reality. We will specifically focus on this novel depiction of the formalism concerning quantum reality, which enables us to reconsider the numerous objections to the histories interpretation that were raised in previous chapters and re-examine/resolve from the nomological perspective the several aforementioned ontological and logical issues of quantum histories interpretation. However, there still remain challenging issues in the understanding of quantum histories.
This chapter, along with the next two chapters, sets the basic context for the readers to go into the topic of this book. Physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers struggle to clarify the foundations of quantum mechanics and debate on the interpretations of quantum mechanics. What is the foundation of quantum mechanics and how to interpret the formalism of quantum mechanics are the core issues of concern in the philosophy of physics. These two questions also involve fundamental issues in the general philosophy of science and even metaphysics and epistemology. This chapter introduces the original thoughts, historical developments, and current status of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, as well as its connection with the philosophy of science and metaphysics; it also analyzes the classifications by Bell, Leifer, and Cabello on the spectrum of interpretations of quantum mechanics, which can be regarded as a sort of “navigation map”. On this basis, the main object of discussion in this book is introduced – the quantum histories interpretation.
In this paper we investigate the history of relationalism and its present use in some interpretations of quantum mechanics. In the first part of this article we will provide a conceptual analysis of the relation between substantivalism, relationalism and relativism in the history of both physics and philosophy. In the second part, we will address some relational interpretations of quantum mechanics, namely, Bohr's relational approach, the modal interpretation by Kochen, the perspectival modal version by Bene and Dieks and the relational interpretation by Rovelli. We will argue that all these interpretations ground their understanding of relations in epistemological terms. By taking into account the analysis on the first part of our work, we intend to highlight the fact that there is a different possibility for understanding quantum mechanics in relational terms which has not been yet considered within the foundational literature. This possibility is to consider relations in (non-relativist) ontological terms. We will argue that such an understanding might be capable of providing a novel approach to the problem of representing what quantum mechanics is really talking about.
Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence.