Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Realism and metaphysics in quantum mechanics   According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true
description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter,
we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That
is, we are concerned with the following questions: what there is, according to
our best scientific theories? And how are these things that theories say exist?
We start from the assumption that a genuine scientific realism must deal with
these issues. Taking non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a case study, we
discuss some of the challenges currently faced by a genuinely realistic stance.
We argue, first, that in the ontological aspect, realists are in the same boat
as science, that is, without sufficient epistemic justification to adopt the
belief in the entities postulated by a single quantum theory, given that
experience (currently) is not able to decide between rival theories; in the
metaphysical aspect, realists also encounter problems with theory choice, given
the possibility of associating more than one metaphysical theory with the
description of the entities postulated by each quantum theory. The same goes
for structuralist alternatives, since, even if we accept that scientific
theories are committed to the existence of structures, but not objects, we
still do not know what structures are, metaphysically. Finally, we move forward
in the discussion with the meta-Popperian method, which serves to reduce the
metaphysical alternatives associated with the ontological postulates of
scientific theories. We may not know what the correct alternative is, but we
have been able to progressively check which metaphysical alternatives are
incompatible with each scientific theory.

18
The categories of this paper are: econ
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
2
The categories of this paper are: math
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int