Abstract
This paper will discuss the representation of properties in two modal interpretations of quantum mechanics: Richard Healey’s interactive interpretation (Healey, 1989) and the Kochen-Dieks-Clifton (KDC) interpretation, as presented in Clifton (1995). Like many realist interpretations, these interpretations take the set of a system’s dynamical properties, ordered by some appropriate ordering relation, to be isomorphic to the set of projection operators in the Hilbert space associated with the system. The two interpretations share a further similarity: as i will discuss in Section 3, they both assign to the biorthogonal decomposition theorem (or to a generalization of that theorem) a central role in determining which of a system’s properties are possessed at a given time.
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Reeder, N. (1998). Projection Operators, Properties, and Idempotent Variables in the Modal Interpretations. In: Dieks, D., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) The Modal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5084-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5084-2_6
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