Abstract
Adopting Murdoch’s pragmatist reading of Bohr’s theory of meaning with regard to Bohr’s notion of complementarity, in this paper I try to see Bohr’s post-Como and, in particular, post-EPR philosophy of quantum mechanics in the light of Peircean pragmatism with the hope that such a construal can shed more light to Bohr’s philosophy. I supplement Murdoch’s position on Bohr’s pragmatism by showing that in addition to his complementarity, Bohr’s correspondence principle, instrumentalism and realism can be read on the basis of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and his notion of indeterminism has commonalities with Peirce’s tychism. Also, Bohr’s practice of applying the correspondence principle can be interpreted in the light of Peirce’s fallibilism. However, when it comes to Bohr’s understanding of the symbolic character of quantum mechanics, Bohr’s philosophy deviates from Peircean pragmatism. Bohr’s philosophy distinguishes between the symbolic language of quantum formalism, which counts as a tool practically useful for prediction, and observation sentences which are visualizable in space and time and refer to the so-called individual phenomena. Such an epistemologically significant distinction is not recognized by Peircean pragmatism.
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Notes
Recently Maleeh and Amani (2013) have listed the shared elements between Bohr’s philosophy and logical positivism.
This is why we sometimes witness huge differences among scholars on interpreting Bohr, even in recent research projects on him. For example, Bokulich (2008) reads Bohr's correspondence principle very differently from the way the majority philosophers read the principle.
Quoted from Bohr (1922, 24).
The adiabatic principle is the first fundamental principle of the older quantum mechanics which addresses the formal applicability of classical mechanics to quantum theory as far a given stationary state is concerned (Jammer 1966, 109).
To achieve the goal of this paper and for the sake of simplicity there is no need to discuss more than these two aspects. I take the formal aspect to include the numerical one. Others have differentiated more than two aspects with regard to the analogy between classical and quantum mechanics in the light of the correspondence principle. For example Radder (1991) distinguishes three aspects: numerical, conceptual and formal. Hartmann (2002) claims that at least seven kinds of correspondence should be taken into consideration: correspondences between theoretical terms, numerical values, observations, initial or boundary conditions, laws, models and structures.
Quoted from Bohr (1922, 12–13).
Translated from German by Brigitte Falkenburg (2007, 190).
Making use of macroscopic measuring devices as well as of quasi-classical measurement theories is inevitable in any quantum experiment. The latter theories “are based on constructing the scales of physical quantities quasi-classically, that is, as if there were physical objects with a given size, mass, charge, momentum and energy” (Falkenburg 2007, 76).
In this way, the intension of a concept, as Carnap (1947) puts it, is pragmatically anchored.
Practical consequences, according to Peirce, should meet two restrictions: they should be general. That is, for example, as regards ‘hard’ objects, we should search for laws that govern the way hard things behave and laws that show how such modes of behavior can make a difference in our rational action. This is the second restriction: practical consequences are restricted to those that affect our ‘intellectual purport’. James did not share such restrictions with Peirce. For him, practical consequences of a proposition can simply be the effects upon the believer.
This phase has been discussed in detail in Radder (1988).
Generally, a phenomenon is the resultant of the interaction between a physical object and measuring device under well-defined experimental conditions. The essential difference between classical and quantum physics is that the interaction in quantum domain must at least comprise one quantum and cannot be made arbitrarily small (Hilgevoord and Uffink 2006). Bohr acknowledges the difference by his ‘quantum postulate’: “[… the] essence [of the formulation of the quantum theory] may be expressed in the so-called quantum postulate, which attributes to any atomic process an essential discontinuity or rather individuality, completely foreign to classical theories and symbolized by Planck's quantum of action” (Bohr 1928, 580). According to Bohr’s construal of the term, in the quantum domain, as we will see soon, the concept of ‘phenomenon’, contrary to classical phenomena, requires indivisibility between the quantum object and the instrument. In this paper, in the context of quantum mechanics, I use ‘quantum phenomena (phenomenon)’ and ‘phenomena (phenomenon)’ interchangeably and to be distinguished from classical sense of the term.
Note that the notion of object-instrument wholeness is not a substitute for the notion of object-instrument interaction. In Bohr’s philosophy the former presupposes the latter.
From now on, till the end of this subsection, I will be summarizing Murdoch’s (1987) ideas on Bohr’s theory of meaning backed up by Bohr’s own quotes.
The way I interpret Bohr’s preconditions of the meaningful ascribability slightly deviates from Murdoch’s interpretation. He distinguishes two meaning conditions: ‘weak meaning condition’ and ‘Strong meaning condition’. The former considers the reference to the experimental arrangement as the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for meaningful ascribability. The sufficient condition is satisfied not only by the reference to a well-defined measuring instrument but also by a phenomenon in Bohr’s technical sense. This idea embraces the notion of strong meaning condition (Murdoch 1987, 148). Thus construed, the reference to the measuring instrument and the notion of phenomenon jointly provide the sufficient condition for the meaningful ascribability. In my view, however, the notion of phenomenon as explicated earlier in this section would suffice as the condition for the meaningful ascribability since it already requires and presupposes reference to the complete description of the entire experimental arrangement. Such a construal squares better with Bohr’s later ideas on the notion of phenomena.
This is why Peirce’s notion of synechism is not in line with Bohr’s philosophy. In synechism, everything is regarded as continuous.
Quantum mechanics qua mathematical theory of motion can be applied to both micro- and macrophysical objects. Quantum mechanics as the theory of matter and radiation, however, only applies to the microphysical realm.
Bohr also rejects the strong instrumentalist view of Mach. Faye (1991, 209) interprets Bohr's statement on the reality of atoms (stated above) as not being a clue to Bohr's ontology, but "as a reaction to the denial in the late nineteenth century, by Ernst Mach and other chemists, of the existence of atoms. Mach was a phenomenalist par excellence … who maintained that both physical and mental phenomena are reducible to certain basic elements of perception, sense data (Empfindungen), which are claimed to be neutral."
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Phil Dowe of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, for his support and supervision.
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Maleeh, R. Bohr’s Philosophy in the Light of Peircean Pragmatism. J Gen Philos Sci 46, 3–21 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-014-9274-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-014-9274-4