David Wallace

speaker

1,940 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard 20 Jul

David Wallace’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Emily Adlam & David Wallace: The Quantum Interpretation That Divides Physicists · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

The extent to which that view fits...

the views that various time slicers themselves have held, I couldn't tell you.

Some of them have been quite sympathetic to it.

So, yeah, I mean, ontic structural realism has been used to mean anything from the kind of very deflationary math-oriented metaphysics I like to a sort of priority monism with deep ties to sublastic metaphysics.

You disagree, for instance, about whether on current scientific evidence, we have excellent reason to believe we're living in one of a vast number of power units.

That I completely disagree.

I mean, in a sense, I haven't got a dog in the fight.

I mean, the version of Everett I'm interested in doesn't have this problem particularly.

But to defend the honor of the relationist, I mean...

And somewhat analogous issues come up in the epistemology of Everett as well.

The crucial place is how much we need to inject the phrase in an absolute sense into things.

So do we need intersubjective agreement between scientists?

Sure we do.

Do we need to be able to trust that when I...

report my results to you you uh understand the results the same way i gave them to you yes of course we do do we have to assume that the scientific community can communicate among themselves effectively yes of course we do do we need to accept any of those things as being true when we insert the phrase in an absolute sense um i want to claim the former is just obviously necessary by just an internal observation of scientific practice and the latter is something that philosophers put in um

that goes beyond what's inside a sort of practice-based analysis of the science.

So if you look at the first paper Ravelli ever has on relationism, it says something like, the presumption we're going to make is that all statements are to be evaluated

Anything you say, any statement at all in quantum mechanics or derivative DNA is always going to be evaluated relative to a context.

So if you think that science requires agreement in an absolute sense, and if in an absolute sense is to be taken as explicitly metaphysically contradicting that statement, then yeah, sure, of course you better reject relational quantum mechanics.

And we don't need to get into the weeds of relational quantum mechanics to establish that.

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