The Kantian Framework of Complementarity

TL;DR

This paper explores the deep structural similarities between Kant's epistemology and Bohr's complementarity in quantum mechanics, showing that Bohr's ideas align with Kantian principles about the nature of scientific objects and knowledge.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis linking Bohr's complementarity interpretation to Kantian epistemology, clarifying their conceptual connection beyond superficial similarities.

Findings

Bohr's argument that wave and particle descriptions do not identify objects in the traditional sense

Kant's requirement for mathematical and dynamical principles in experience

Complementarity aligns with Kantian epistemological framework

Abstract

A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between Bohr and Kant is painted in broad strokes; it is open to the criticism that these affinities are merely superficial. In this essay, I provide a closer, structural, analysis of both Bohr's and Kant's views that makes these connections more explicit. In particular, I demonstrate the similarities between Bohr's argument, on the one hand, that neither the wave nor the particle description of atomic phenomena pick out an object in the ordinary sense of the word, and Kant's requirement, on the other hand, that both 'mathematical' (having to do with magnitude) and 'dynamical' (having to do with an object's interaction with other objects) principles must be applicable to appearances in order for us to determine them as objects of experience. I argue that Bohr's 'Complementarity interpretation' of quantum mechanics, which views atomic objects as idealizations, and which licenses the repeal of the principle of causality for the domain of atomic physics, is perfectly compatible with, and indeed follows naturally from a broadly Kantian epistemological framework.