Macroscopic reality and the dynamical reduction program
pp. 221-240
in: Kees Doets, Daniele Mundici (eds), Structures and norms in science, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
A quite natural question which all scientists who are concerned about the meaning and the value of science have to face is whether one can elaborate a worldview which can accommodate our knowledge about natural phenomena. As is well known, this desideratum does not raise particular problems within classical physics for various reasons which have been lucidly pointed out by J.S. Bell [1]: Of course it is true that also in classical mechanics any isolation of a particular system from the world as a whole involves approximation. But at least one can envisage an accurate theory, of the universe, to which the restricted account is an approximation, ... and moreover ... even a human observer is no trouble (in principle) in classical theory — he can be included in the system (in a schematic way) by postulating a "psycho-physical parallelism" — i.e., supposing his experience to be correlated with some function of the coordinates.