Sunday, May 19, 2019

The nature of properties

Paul Busch developed the idea* of an “unsharp reality” whose objects had “unsharp properties.”
Dennis Dicks concluded that properties are perspectival, relational, hyperplane dependent, and are neither monadic nor locally defined.** I disagree that these are “...a move away from classical intuitions.”** On a driver’s license, for example, a person is identified by their height, weight, and eye color. We understand that all of these properties may change for that individual, a very classical notion. And if the dependence of length and mass on motion with respect to the observer required relativistic mechanics the dependence of color with respect to observer motion was already present in the classical Doppler effect.
From Niels Bohr we have that physical quantities (properties) are defined by the experimental arrangement/conditions that produce (respond to) them. I.e., time is what is measured by a clock, magnetic field is what a compass responds to, etc. Asa’s sensors and procedures are what define the properties it knows about.
“Objects” or Lockean empirical substances are, in turn, collections of such properties.

* Recent Developments in Quantum Logic, Mittelstaedt and Stachow, Ed’s., 1985, pg 81-101.
**Quantum Reality, Perspectivalism and Covariance, May 2019, arxiv: 1905.05097.

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