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In this Special Issue, we would like to bring the debate into the metaphysical field, encouraging investigations that travel in a two-way street: how and whether quantum mechanics can inform metaphysics and, conversely, how and whether metaphysics itself can contribute to our understanding of the world according to quantum mechanics.

The relationship between science and metaphysics has been a hot topic for the last few decades, and there are no surprises to find that quantum mechanics occupies a prominent place in these discussions. After all, it is the perfect candidate for controversy on this issue: an extremely well-confirmed theory, but one that does not uniquely tell us what it is about. The scientific image provided by its equations has a lot of room for interpretation.

To begin with, there is extensive literature debating the theory’s subject matter: is it a theory that deals with waves, particles, or something else entirely, such as wave functions? It is also natural to ask questions about quantum mechanics ontology when we ask, for example, about issues of existence related to quantum mechanics. After all, if we want to discover what there is in our world, it seems like a good idea to look for the answers in our physical theories: electrons? Many worlds? Structures? In a second way, it is debated how philosophical conceptions can shape our own picture of the physical world: would they be individual quantum entities in the Leibnizian sense of the term? Can the atomism implicit in different formulations of the theory become an obstacle for the theory itself to be really understood? Should we create new ontological categories so that we can classify quantum entities?

Richard Feynman famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics more than half a century ago. Maybe metaphysics as a discipline (also encompassing ontology) could shed some light on this issue (contra Feynman’s opinions about metaphysics). While some follow this path, others, such as David Lewis, expressed skepticism about taking metaphysical lessons from quantum mechanics. We encourage submissions beyond such skepticism (or elaborating on it) and going even further: can we take quantum-mechanical lessons from metaphysics? To advance the debate concerning metaphysics and quantum mechanics, we invite submissions of original work on the metaphysics of science, broadly understood, that addresses questions such as the ones in the following non-exhaustive list:

1. What is to interpret quantum mechanics?
2. What is the connection between quantum theory and its ontology?
3. What is the world like, according to quantum mechanics?
4. Is there a clear metaphysical picture provided by quantum mechanics?
5. What does it mean to adopt a realist stance toward quantum mechanics?
6. Can metaphysics contribute to a quantum mechanical picture of reality?

This was the subject of the VIII International Workshop on Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information, promoted by the International Network on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information. Still, everyone is welcome to submit a paper.

Click here to complete your submission. (Please select the option “Quantum Mechanics and Reality” in the “Section” field.)

The deadline for submitting a contributed paper is June 30, 2023.

Guest Editors
Christian de Ronde (UBA/CONICET/UNAJ/CLEA)
Jonas R. Becker Arenhart (UFSC/UFMA/CNPq)
Raimundo Fernández-Mouján (UBA/CONICET/CLEA)
Raoni W. Arroyo (CLE/UNICAMP/FAPESP)