2 Comments

1. Listened with interest! Here is a question – why is it the case that we humans (even the best minds – the topmost physicists) are not able to understand quantum physics?
   I would suggest to have a look into the book – Quantum Philosophy by Roland Omnes.

   And why was there so fierce debate between Bohr and Einstein – on the nature of Quantum Physics over the issue of its ‘probabilistic’ theories… when Einstein said – “God doesn’t play dice!” In my view, Einstein was a realist and so believed in an objective, true existence (and hence description) of reality… This is a tacit presupposition, or a metaphysical intuition. On the other hand, Bohr, and now van Fraassen, seem to believe in constructivism … which gives space to think of reality as not rigidly pre-determined or objective, where electrons, photons don’t have a pre-determined nature of being a wave or a particle…! Maybe the problem is stemming out of ‘our’ conceptual categories of something being ‘wave’, ‘particle’, not which nature need to respect…!

   Reply

2. It’s not just ‘belief’… its a ‘paradigm’ – a repository of tacit, implicit intuitions (about the fundamental nature of reality, or its categories esp. about the nature of space, time, causation – linear or reciprocal causation, etc.) which are presupposed to articulate any explicit linguistic statement. I think, i can also call it ‘worldview’. If it is not shared with other, we can make no sense of that other’s actions or words.

   Now in translations, how much translatability is permitted is dependent on the degree of convergence of such tacitly held worldviews … inherent in their Forms of Life (as later-Wittgenstein would say) and hence in their language. If Incommensurability strikes occasionally, but not too much, it indicates that there is a lot of convergence but sometimes it fails (at incommensurability).

   Reply