QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

questions which have been pondered within natural philosophy since ancient times. As
philosophers, however, there are several reasons for considering them to be no more than
amateurs. They did not know the traditions of philosophy, and their handling of conceptual
analysis certainly did not shine. They did not even write down a systematic and comprehensive
presentation of their thinking concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics. On the other
hand, the Copenhagen group had something without which even the best philosophy remains
ungrounded. They had an experimentally based certainty that the description of nature employed
by classical physics was no longer adequate, and a justified view of the matters in which a
reappraisal was required.
Max Born’s question ”How is it possible to speak of an objective world when the atomic world
cannot be manifested without account being taken of the observer and the whole measurement
situation?” 581 is characteristic of the starting points employed by the Copenhagen group. Since it
did not agree with either classical realism or mechanical-deterministic space-time descriptions,
interpretation was often outright thought of as being Positivist. The Copenhagen group,
however, wanted to explicitly understand and explain the apparent paradoxes that quantum
mechanics brought with it. Since the framework of classical physics had been revealed as being
too narrow, they did not just content themselves with the situation declaring that all frames of
reference contained unnecessary metaphysics. In the light of new knowledge, they were ready to
re-evaluate the fundamental character of reality. Born’s realism was revealed in his response that
”only theoretical physics is true philosophy, which also has the ability to further deeper
knowledge and understanding of the world”. Physics had revolutionised the basic concepts of
time, space, causality and matter, and it was now able to teach us a new way of thinking such as
complementarity. 582
Heisenberg, who emphasised the mathematical methods, is generally considered to be the most
Positivist of the developers of the Copenhagen interpretation. According to his own
crystallisation, quantum mechanics raises two fundamental groups of problems: ontological
questions concerning the nature of matter or even further, the ancient Greek question of how the
manifold phenomena associated with matter can be understood with a single principle, and the
epistemological question of objectivisation, which, especially following Kant, has been current:
how far is it possible for us to be objective about our observations concerning nature, i.e. in
581 Born 1983, 50.
582 Born 1968, 48.
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