What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

This left positivists in a pickle. They thought it was meaningless to talk about a world that existed independently of perception, but they also wanted to be able to say that science worked. They got around this problem by developing a view of scientific practice that meshed well with their verification theory of meaning. Science, on their account, was about organizing perceptions. Scientific theories were merely methods of predicting future perceptions by churning past perceptions through mathematical machinery. Science wasn’t about an objectively real world that existed independently of our perceptions, because anything that existed beyond perception—even a putatively “real” world—was simply metaphysics. Any statements that scientists made about nonobservable yet “real” things on the basis of their scientific theories were dismissed as unnecessary hypotheses, extraneous metaphysical baggage irrelevant to the true task of science.

Hmm