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Weak Discernibility and Relations between Quanta

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Joshua Norton
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Abstract

Some authors (Muller and Saunders, Huggett and Norton) have attempted to defend Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles through weak discernibility. The idea is that if there is a symmetric, nonreflexive physical relation that holds between two particles, then those particles cannot be identical. In this article I focus only on Muller and Saunders’s account and argue that the means by which they achieve weak discernibility is not through a quantum mechanical observable but an alternate mathematical construction that is both unorthodox and incomplete.

Type
Quantum Physics
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 1188 - 1199
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Nick Huggett, Christian Wüthrich, Jeremy Butterfield, Adam Caulton, Fred Muller, Simon Saunders, as well as the varied participants at the 2014 Philosophy of Science Association conference for their comments on this article or its earlier instantiations.

References

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