La teoría cuántica: ¿realismo o pragmatismo?

Abstract

During his long and extraordinarily productive career Hilary Putnam occasionally

flirted with pragmatism. But his scientific realism provided a fixed point of his attempts

to interpret quantum theory. I have argued recently that pragmatist treatments of

representation, explanation and probability are keys to understanding how we use

quantum theory so successfully, and so how it should be interpreted. For Putnam,

scientific realism is itself a scientific hypothesis that explains the success of science.

If I am right, the success of quantum theory undermines this kind of scientific

realism while supporting a rival pragmatism. Scientific realism remains immune to

empirical refutation if it is viewed not as a scientific hypothesis but as a regulative

ideal. But a pragmatist view of quantum theory poses a challenge to a certain kind of

metaphysical realism.