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Quantum Disjunctive Facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

James H. McGrath
James H. McGrath*
Affiliation:
615 West May Street, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan 48858
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To the memory of John D. Trimmer

This paper assesses the impact of disjunctive facts on the quantum logic read off procedure. The purpose of the procedure is to transfer a significant quantum structure to a set of propositions; its first step is an attempt to discover that structure. Here I propose that disjunctive facts as traditionally conceived have blocked the procedure at its first step and have therefore subverted the best-known attempts to read off quantum logic. Recently however Allen Stairs has proposed a view of disjunctive facts which re-establishes the possibility of reading off quantum logic. Both the traditional conception and Stairs’ revision of disjunctive facts are interesting in their own right, independent of quantum propositional logic.

Too many things are called ‘quantum logic’. The term is disentangled and notation is fixed in this preliminary step which relies on basic lattice theory.

Type
Part I. Physics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 76 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1986

Footnotes

1

It is a pleasure to acknowledge commentary on a previous draft by Paul Beem, Arthur Fine, Bas van Fraassen and Linda Wessels. This paper is a narrowly-focused continuation of an earlier dialogue: McGrath (1978) and Bugaski (1980).

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