The paper focuses on two problems with Alexander Wendt's unification of physical and social ontology on the basis of quantum theory. Firstly, by endowing social phenomena with an ontological foundation in physical reality defined in quantum terms Wendt risks reducing a plurality of worlds as ‘fields of sense’, ordered by their immanent rules, to the physical world ordered by the laws of quantum theory. Secondly, by defining his quantum social science as an ontology Wendt risks excluding from consideration all that which violates ontological laws, yet may still be said to exist or take place: event, potentiality, and alterity. Although the advantages of a scientific ontology are indisputable, the price we pay for it is a sense of ontological captivity, whereby everything that is definitely is so, being and non-being rigorously distinguished and separated with nothing between them. This captivity may be escaped by supplementing quantum ontology with ethics in the Levinasian sense of ‘otherwise than being’.

Alexander Wendt claims that quantum physics explains deep mysteries about human consciousness and offers a radical new understanding of human behavior and social interaction. However, the claims rest on flawed interpretations of quantum theory, fringe literatures and metaphorical, almost mystical uses of quantum concepts and buzzwords. He fails to provide any account of human conflict, and defends an almost theological view of the importance of humanity in the universe that is incompatible with a scientific perspective.

Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science hypothesizes that all intentional phenomena, including both psychological and social facts, are macroscopic quantum mechanical processes. Whether right or wrong, the suggestion highlights the fact that the social sciences, including IR, have until very recently never systematically discussed the potential relevance to our work of the quantum revolution a century ago. According to Wendt, that has left social scientists today – positivists and interpretivists alike – operating from an implicit and impoverished 19th century worldview that cannot accommodate important facts about human subjectivity. This symposium features critiques of Wendt's vision from multiple perspectives and a response, for one of the first airings of the classical-quantum debate in an IR context.

Research into decision making has enabled us to appreciate that the notion of correctness is multifaceted. Different normative framework for correctness can lead to different insights about correct behavior. We illustrate the shifts for correctness insights with two tasks, the Wason selection task and the conjunction fallacy task; these tasks have had key roles in the development of logical reasoning and decision making research respectively. The Wason selection task arguably has played an important part in the transition from understanding correctness using classical logic to classical probability theory (and information theory). The conjunction fallacy has enabled a similar shift from baseline classical probability theory to quantum probability. The focus of this overview is the latter, as it represents a novel way for understanding probabilistic inference in psychology. We conclude with some of the current challenges concerning the application of quantum probability theory in psychology in general and specifically for the problem of understanding correctness in decision making.

We study Markov measures and p-adic random walks with the use of states on the Cuntz algebras Op. Via the Gelfand–Naimark–Segal construction, these come from families of representations of Op. We prove that these representations reflect selfsimilarity especially well. In this paper, we consider a Cuntz–Krieger type algebra where the adjacency matrix depends on a parameter q ( q=1 is the case of Cuntz–Krieger algebra). This is an ongoing work generalizing a construction of certain measures associated to random walks on graphs.