QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

philosophical works he also wanted, over and above his empirical laboratory work, to defend the
right of metaphysics to exist. Lotze saw that in the final analysis, human intelligence would not
be satisfied with an impeccable description of observed events, but that it would also strive to
interpret the world to which human beings belonged. For this reason, it was essential to proceed
further than what was offered by observed reality and use the metaphysical way of thinking.
According to Lotze, each thinking being walked this road, even though they might claim that
they did not busy themselves with such unscientific questions. For Lotze it was better to be a
conscious metaphysicist than an unconscious one. 401
In discussions with Positivist philosophers at a conference organised in Copenhagen, Niels Bohr
wondered why Philip Frank had used the term ’metaphysics’ in his lecture simply as a curse or,
at best, as a euphemism for unscientific thought. Frank had spoken of metalogic and
metamathematics and Bohr could not see why this prefix ’meta’ which merely suggests that we
are asking further questions, i.e. questions which bear on the fundamental concepts of a
particular discipline, could not be connected with physics. Bohr fully endorsed the Positivist
insistence on conceptual clarity, but their prohibition of any discussion of wider issues simply
because of a lack of sufficiently clear-cut concepts in this particular realm, did not appear very
useful to him. Such a ban would prevent our understanding of quantum theory. 402
Metaphysics is an abstract dicipline which concerns exploration of the most general features of
the world, the broad nature of reality, and the possibility of its objective representation. It can be
divided into three parts: conjectures, basic presuppositions, and mystical beliefs, between which
it is impossible to draw clear lines. Speculative conjecture can lead to empirical theories and
even to fundamental presuppositions, and even though many mystical beliefs can be rejected as
being nothing but nonsense, we can never be certain whether some of them are still left to the
group of fundamental presuppositions that we cherish as being true. Speculative guesswork has
played an essential part in the development of science. Even though its predictions cannot always
be verified immediately in any experiment, they are neither insignificant or meaningless. Just the
reverse, they can turn out to be viewpoints which are extremely informative and which drive
development forward. For example, Democritus’ atomic theory or the proposition put forward by
Copernicus that space was so large that the earth could perhaps be moving even though the fixed
stars appeared to remain stationary, was later proved to be justified on the basis of observations.
On the other hand, it has never been possible to prove by observation that Newton’s theory of
401 Aspelin 1995, 515.
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