Abstract
It is often said that a work of genius resists categorization. If so, Bohr’s philosophical viewpoint easily passes this criterion of greatness. Surely this is one of the reasons for the commonplace complaints over Bohr’s “obscurity”. Thus the scholar who tries to bring Bohr’s outlook to a wider audience is immediately in difficulties which must be familiar to all who have contributed to this volume. If we try to let Bohr speak “in his own words” then we find him most elusive at just those points where we want to pose the questions which our philosophical perspective seems to make inevitable. However, if we try to locate Bohr’s position with respect to traditional philosophical reference points, then we become immediately uneasy over whether his position is correctly represented. Indeed one easily comes to suspect that the philosopher’s categories cannot characterize complementarity without distortion. Perhaps, then, understanding Bohr’s relevance for today’s philosophical discussions may come more easily if we transform the philosophers’ conceptual grid into a system less ambiguous for locating where Bohr stands on the questions that interest us most.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Stace’s description of the idealist advance is too close to the central metaphor of this paper to miss: “No sooner had Kant thus cried Halt!’ to philosophy than philosophy, forming its adherents into a kind of triumphal procession, proceeding, so to speak, with bands playing and flags waving, marched victoriously onward to the final assault, confident of its power to attain omniscience at a stroke, to occupy the very citadel of reality itself. And, strangest of all, this was to be done with the very weapons Kant himself had forged” (Stace, 1955, 43).
The alliance between atomism and realism is so strong for many of those coming from the Popperian viewpoint as to lead them to regard a realist’ interpretation of quantum theory as necessarily committed to an ontology of classical particles. Thus Gibbons claims: “Realism in the philosophy of quantum mechanics means the idea that quantum systems are really like classical particles” (Gibbons, 1987, ix; see also Folse, 1991 for a review of this work). Needless to say, as I use ‘realism’ here, the term is not construed so narrowly.
This passage puts the lie to Faye’s claim that it is “inexplicable why Bohr only once stresses the reality of atoms, viz., in 1929, at a time when Machian phenomenalism might still be fresh in the memory of scientists” (Faye, 1991, 210). The fact that this commitment is not continuously reiterated in his later essays can easily be explained by the reasonable supposition that in the years following World War II, skepticism with respect to the reality of atoms must surely have seemed a decidedly eccentric opinion.
This use of ‘phenomenon’ on Bohr’s part clearly indicates that he does not identify the term with ‘data’, a common philosophers’ confusion recently discussed by Bogen and Woodward (1988). A phenomenon is the event in the ‘independent’ world concerning which the scientist accumulates data’; thus it may be regarded as a single explicandum with a temporal duration from preparation to detection.
To assert OR and deny ER seems to put one among those who claim to know there are unknowable things and would be expected to suffer the same fate as Kant’s thing-in-itself in the attack of the idealists. If Bohr’s notion of ‘atomic systems’ is such a notion, then it ought to join with other departed philosophical ghosts like Aristotle’s ‘prime matter’, Locke’s I know not what’, and Kant’s ding-an-sich’ (see Folse, 1987). Thus it is the objective anti-realist who seems to be in favor of a metaphysical dogma.
Bohr may have been wrong in believing that visualizability was ruled out by the quantum revolution, for as Cushing has nicely shown Bohm is able to retain the ideal of visualizability by sacrificing locality (see Cushing, infra). But Bohr was already aware of the paradoxical conclusions regarding locality which derive from taking visualizability seriously in his original atomic model of 1913. It was just Bohr’s distaste for meddling with locality that led him already at that time to be suspicious of the realists’ reading of the ‘mechanical pictures’ . He judiciously had no desire even to hint at (nor did he believe that there was) any tension between quantum theory and relativity; in fact, of course, he repeatedly called on the latter to do battle on the side of the former, most famously in the 1930 Solvay confrontation with Einstein on the ‘photon in a box’ thought experiment.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Folse, H.J. (1994). Bohr’s Framework of Complementarity and the Realism Debate. In: Faye, J., Folse, H.J. (eds) Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4299-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8106-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive