Hi Richard — I read through your “open_question…” essay last night. I enjoyed reading it, as it contains a very nice collection of quotes from Einstein, Bohr, etc. But I really just don’t get the pragmatic turn you want to take. As I understand it, your pragmatism does not just mean “sometimes we should maybe try things out and see what works and learn from that without worrying, immediately, about what it implies about what it implies about reality”. That I would be all in favor of, sometimes. But to me, that attitude is 100% compatible with the *ultimate* goal remaining to describe the world as accurately and completely as possible. Instead, it seems like you want to permanently and irrevocably give up on the goal of describing the world as accurately and completely as possible. And I just don’t understand what could motivate this. I agree with what Dustin wrote above: this (“realist”) attitude has been central to the scientific enterprise since its inception, and has, I think, demonstrated itself to be quite practical. It seems like the kind of thing you’d only contemplate giving up if you were backed into some kind of corner where you just had no option but to give it up. And of course people have often claimed that this is exactly the situation that we are backed into by QM. But literally every such claim is wrong, and rather straightforwardly demonstrably wrong (in the sense that Bohmian mechanics is a living breathing inspectable counterexample to all of these claims). So why should I abandon the realist attitude and adopt your pragmatism instead??
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.