Explanations from contemporary quantum theories: some ontological characteristics

TL;DR

This paper explores the ontological aspects of explanations in quantum theories, emphasizing the importance of metaphysical commitments and proposing a model with extended material-like entities to support scientific realism.

Contribution

It offers a novel ontological framework for quantum explanations, integrating metaphysical commitments and proposing 'generalised things' as invariants for realism.

Findings

Analysis of historical and philosophical positions on material explanation.

Proposal of a realist explanatory model with extended material entities.

Discussion of quantum phenomena challenges to scientific realism.

Abstract

We begin by surveying the historical positions in different attempts to understand the material world since the rise of modern science, with specific focus on the role of Cartesian primary qualities in explanatory conceptualisation. Moreover the opening chapter argues that although explanatory narratives are essentially epistemological constructions, they require a general metaphysical backing through the explainer's and explainee's commitments to take the concepts and higher structures composed of them as directly referential. Two methodological perspectives on theory construction, Einstein's division into principle and constructive theories, are then delineated along the lines of their metaphysical and explanatory potential, and presented as the research instrument with which to approach the specific-case-study instances of quantum theory reconstruction. A specific strategy of arguing for scientific realism ('the simple transcendental strategy') is then presented and connected to the challenges that the phenomena (EPR correlations and 'teleportation') from the domain of contemporary quantum theory pose for it. The opening chapter concludes with a survey of the general models of explanation and their position with respect to the principle-constructive dichotomy introduced above. Finally, an explanatory model containing extended material-like entities along with further primitives, universal laws of temporal evolution, is argued for. Consequently, in the interest of a wholesome realistic response to the sceptical challenge about the explanatory aims of science, we recommend that even the common sense conceptual framework replaces the extended material structure with 'generalised things' as re-identifiable invariants through change as the fundamental unit of the realist ontology.