Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-18-2014
Abstract
I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence.
Recommended Citation
E. Adlam, The problem of confirmation in the Everett interpretation, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 47, 21-32 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2014.03.004
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
Elsevier
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, volume 47, in 2014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2014.03.004
The Creative Commons license below applies only to this version of the article.