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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on September 9, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):615-634; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi135
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics (Again)*

Hilary Putnam

Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA hputnam{at}fas.harvard.edu

‘A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Mechanics’ (Putnam [1965]) explained why the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a philosophical problem in detail, but with only the necessary minimum of technicalities, in the hope of making the difficulties intelligible to as wide an audience as possible. When I wrote it, I had not seen Bell ([1964]), nor (of course) had I seen Ghirardi et al. ([1986]). And I did not discuss the ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation. For all these reasons, I have decided to make a similar attempt forty years later, taking account of additional interpretations and of our knowledge concerning non-locality. (The Quantum Logical interpretation proposed in Putnam [1968] is not considered in the present paper, however, because Putnam [1994b] concluded that it was unworkable.) Rather than advocate a particular interpretation, this paper classifies the possible kinds of interpretation, subject only to the constraints of a very broadly construed scientific realism. Section 7 does, however, argue that two sorts of interpretation—ones according to which a ‘collapse’ is brought about by the measurement (e.g. the traditional ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation), and the Many Worlds interpretation or interpretations—should be ruled out. The concluding section suggests some possible morals of a cosmological character.

  1. Background
  2. Scientific realism is the premise of my discussion
  3. What ‘quantum mechanics’ says—and some problems
  4. Other interpretations of quantum mechanics
  5. The problem of Einstein's bed
  6. Classification of the possible kinds of interpretation
  7. Which interpretations I think we can rule out
  8. The ‘moral’ of this discussion


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V. Allori, S. Goldstein, R. Tumulka, and N. Zanghi
On the Common Structure of Bohmian Mechanics and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber Theory: Dedicated to GianCarlo Ghirardi on the occasion of his 70th birthday
Brit J Philos Sci, July 11, 2008; (2008) axn012v1.
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