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Complementarity And The Scientific Method: A Criticism, Patrick A. Heelan

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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 …