Quantum ontology and intuitions

Abstract

Among the various proposals for quantum ontology, both wavefunction realists and the primitive ontologists have argued that their approach is to be preferred because it relies on intuitive notions: locality, separability and spatiotemporality. As such, these proposals should be seen as normative frameworks asserting that one should choose the fundamental ontology which preserves these intuitions, even if they disagree about their relative importance: wavefunction realists favor preserving locality and separability, while primitive ontologists advocate for spatiotemporality. In this paper, first I clarify the main tenets of wavefunction realism and the primitive ontology approach, arguing that seeing the latter as favoring constructive explanation makes sense of their requirement of a spatiotemporal ontology. Then I show how the aforementioned intuitive notions cannot all be kept in the quantum domain. Consequently, wavefunction realists rank locality and separability higher than spatiotemporality, while primitive ontologists do the opposite. I conclude that however, the choice of which notions to favor is not as arbitrary as it might seem. In fact, they are not independent: requiring locality and separability can soundly be justified by requiring spatiotemporality, and not the other way around. If so, the primitive ontology approach has a better justification of its intuitions than its rival wavefunction realist framework.