What Do Black Holes Teach Us About Wigner’s Friend?

Authors

• Emily Adlam, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-29-2026

Abstract

Recently, Hausmann and Renner have pointed out that several famous paradoxes relating to black holes have a similar character to various Extended Wigner’s Friend paradoxes. In this paper I consider what the connection between these things could teach us about the Wigner’s Friend scenarios. I argue that if we take the analogy between these cases seriously, the black hole paradoxes appear to favour a certain class of response to the Wigner’s Friend scenario - specifically, those which posit intrinsic relationality, rather than effective and emergent relationality, and also those which posit some kind of retrocausality.

Comments

This article was originally published in European Journal for Philosophy of Science , volume 16, in 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-026-00744-x

Recommended Citation

Adlam, E. What do black holes teach us about Wigner’s Friend?. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 16, 38 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-026-00744-x

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.