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A Philosopher Looks at Quantum Information Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Amit Hagar
Amit Hagar*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada, email: ahagar@interchange.ubc.ca.
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Abstract

Recent suggestions to supply quantum mechanics (QM) with realistic foundations by reformulating it in light of quantum information theory (QIT) are examined and are found wanting by pointing to a basic conceptual problem that QIT itself ignores, namely, the measurement problem. Since one cannot ignore the measurement problem and at the same time pretend to be a realist, as they stand, the suggestions to reformulate QM in light of QIT are nothing but instrumentalism in disguise.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , October 2003 , pp. 752 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I thank Meir Hemmo for encouragement and discussions, Chris Fuchs for stimulating conversations, and William Demopoulos and Steven Savitt for a careful reading of earlier drafts of this paper. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.

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