David Lewis famously quipped that he was willing to take metaphysical lessons from quantum mechanics only when it cleaned up its own act by providing interpretations or modifications of the formalism shorn of appeal to consciousness, irreducibly macroscopic notions, or outright instrumentalism. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, multiple approaches to quantum mechanics had been developed to a degree which met Lewis’s challenge: dynamical-collapse theories, Bohm-style hidden-variable theories, and Everett-style many-worlds theories, for all their respective problems and challenges, all offer ways of understanding quantum mechanics that metaphysicians can reasonably engage with. And so the last twenty years have seen a resurgence in the metaphysics of quantum mechanics, the question of what ontology and ideology is appropriate to a quantum universe. The metaphysics of quantum mechanics is not independent of the quantum measurement problem but does not coincide with it, either: there is a widespread view that adopting,...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
October 01 2022
The World in the Wave Function
Ney, Alyssa,
The World in the Wave Function
. Oxford
: Oxford University Press
, 2021
. 269 pp.
The Philosophical Review (2022) 131 (4): 528–532.
Citation
David Wallace; The World in the Wave Function. The Philosophical Review 1 October 2022; 131 (4): 528–532. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10136934
Download citation file:
Advertisement
299
Views