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Full-Text Articles in History of Philosophy
Complementarity And The Scientific Method: A Criticism, Patrick A. Heelan
Complementarity And The Scientific Method: A Criticism, Patrick A. Heelan
Research Resources
In this chapter "Conplementarity and the Scientific Method" of his Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, Heelan argues that the philosophy of complementarity, although successful in providing physicists with a common language with which to describe quantum phenomena, also contains a theory about scientific method and about human knowing which is open to criticism. Heelan here criticises the following points arising out of the philosophy of complementarity: psycho-physical parallelism; the view that quantum mechanical properties are to be defined classically; and the perturbation theory of measurement. In the course of the criticism, he elaborates the distinction between two types of concepts …
Reality In Heisenberg's Philosophy - Chapter Eight Of Heelan's Quantum Mechanics And Objectivity, Patrick Heelan
Reality In Heisenberg's Philosophy - Chapter Eight Of Heelan's Quantum Mechanics And Objectivity, Patrick Heelan
Research Resources
This chapter contains a study of Heisenberg's views of the ontological content of quantum mechanics from I925 until the present day. During the quantum revolution of I925, he began by accepting a Berkeley-type empiricism in which the reality of a quantum mechanical system was reduced to that of a set of observation events, which were, however, acausally connected and in consequence did not constitute a stable phenomenal object of experimental knowledge. After 1955, he professed a modified form of Kantian philosophy whose starting point was the existence of universal and necessary scientific laws. Those universal and necessary scientific laws from …