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Van Fraassen and Ruetsche on Preparation and Measurement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Bradley Monton*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
*
Department of Philosophy, 1879 Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544–1006; e-mail: [email protected].

Abstract

Ruetsche (1996) has argued that van Fraassen's (1991) Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation (CVMI) gives unsatisfactory accounts of measurement and of state preparation. I defend the CVMI against Ruetsche's first argument by using decoherence to show that the CVMI does not need to account for the measurement scenario which Ruetsche poses. I then show, however, that there is a problem concerning preparation, and the problem is more serious than the one Ruetsche focuses on. The CVMI makes no substantive predictions for the everyday processes we take to be measurements.

Type
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

I thank Laura Ruetsche and Bas van Fraassen for helpful discussion. This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

References

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van Fraassen, Bas (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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