Stefano Osnaghi

Stefano Osnaghi
pas labex
pas Eurias

dates de séjour

12/09/2016 - 14/07/2017

discipline

Philosophie

Fonction d’origine

Chercheur

Institution d’origine

Institute for Cultural Inquiry of Berlin (Allemagne)

pays d'origine

Italie

projet de recherche

Non-representational semantics and quantum structures. A normative approach to the justification of the uncertainty relations

The approach that I propose to investigate as a means to overcome the shortcomings of standard operational reconstructions introduces a new kind of conceptual relations, which should be taken to express the probabilistic inferential links existing between (sentences that attribute a value to) certain pairs of observables. (This move is to be contrasted with the more familiar strategy which introduces quantum logic as a means to capture the non-classical structure of putative microscopic properties, and then builds upon it a non-classical probabilistic calculus.) Were it possible to construe the uncertainty relations along these lines, one would no longer be concerned with reducing the validity of the corresponding probabilistic inferences to (empirical principles involving) extensional conceptual relations, as those instantiated by classical logical connectives. The threat of inconsistency would thus be removed at the outset. But how can the introduction of the suitable probabilistic conceptual relations be justified in the first place?

biographie

Stefano Osnaghi was born in Milan, where he studied theoretical physics before moving to Paris and receiving a PhD in quantum physics and, more recently, a PhD in philosophy, both from the École Normale Supérieure. As a postdoc researcher he worked at the Federal Universities of Salvador da Bahia and Santa Catarina, at the École Polytechnique of Paris, and at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften of Vienna. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford University with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from 2009 to 2011, and has been a fellow at the ICI Berlin since 2012. Besides working on quantum entanglement as an experimental physicist, he has published papers on the history and the philosophy of quantum mechanics, most of which deal with the so-called measurement problem. In these works, the measurement problem is not regarded as an issue to be addressed by physics, but rather as a paradigmatic example of a class of semantic and epistemological puzzles whose dissolution has occupied philosophers of the transcendental and pragmatist tradition since Kant and Wittgenstein.