{"title":"Perspectivism and Quantum Mechanics","authors":"Philipp Berghofer, Mahdi Khalili","doi":"10.1007/s10701-026-00937-7","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This special issue brings perspectivism, as a recent development in the philosophy of science, into contact with non-objectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics. By “objectivist interpretations,” broadly understood, we mean interpretations that seek to eliminate operational notions such as “measurement” from the fundamental postulates of the theory and insist that quantum mechanics, like classical mechanics, yields a purely objective, third-person description of how reality evolves in time. The guiding hypothesis, exemplified in several contributions to this issue, is that quantum mechanics supports perspectivist approaches to science, and that perspectivism can serve as a suitable philosophical-conceptual framework for certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":569,"journal":{"name":"Foundations of Physics","volume":"56 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2026-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Foundations of Physics","FirstCategoryId":"101","ListUrlMain":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-026-00937-7","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"PHYSICS, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This special issue brings perspectivism, as a recent development in the philosophy of science, into contact with non-objectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics. By “objectivist interpretations,” broadly understood, we mean interpretations that seek to eliminate operational notions such as “measurement” from the fundamental postulates of the theory and insist that quantum mechanics, like classical mechanics, yields a purely objective, third-person description of how reality evolves in time. The guiding hypothesis, exemplified in several contributions to this issue, is that quantum mechanics supports perspectivist approaches to science, and that perspectivism can serve as a suitable philosophical-conceptual framework for certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.
期刊介绍:
The conceptual foundations of physics have been under constant revision from the outset, and remain so today. Discussion of foundational issues has always been a major source of progress in science, on a par with empirical knowledge and mathematics. Examples include the debates on the nature of space and time involving Newton and later Einstein; on the nature of heat and of energy; on irreversibility and probability due to Boltzmann; on the nature of matter and observation measurement during the early days of quantum theory; on the meaning of renormalisation, and many others.
Today, insightful reflection on the conceptual structure utilised in our efforts to understand the physical world is of particular value, given the serious unsolved problems that are likely to demand, once again, modifications of the grammar of our scientific description of the physical world. The quantum properties of gravity, the nature of measurement in quantum mechanics, the primary source of irreversibility, the role of information in physics – all these are examples of questions about which science is still confused and whose solution may well demand more than skilled mathematics and new experiments.
Foundations of Physics is a privileged forum for discussing such foundational issues, open to physicists, cosmologists, philosophers and mathematicians. It is devoted to the conceptual bases of the fundamental theories of physics and cosmology, to their logical, methodological, and philosophical premises.
The journal welcomes papers on issues such as the foundations of special and general relativity, quantum theory, classical and quantum field theory, quantum gravity, unified theories, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, cosmology, and similar.