The role played by scientific realism in the measurement problem of quantum mechanics

Abstract

Many attempts have been made to characterise and solve the infamous measurement problem of quantum mechanics by advocating, implicitly or explicitly, different realist perspectives. As a result, we are still uncertain where this problem and its corresponding solution are to be located in the realism-antirealism debate. On the basis of a well-known characterisation of scientific realism, this paper intends to fill this gap by arguing that the quantum description of the processes involved in typical measurements is problematic from the standpoint of semantic realism, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for fully-fledged scientific realism.