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85Arló-Costa, H., 479 Armour-Garb, B., 593 Azzouni, J., 329 Batens, D., 267Journal of Philosophical Logic 30 (619). 2001.
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13An Assessment of Contemporary Polish OntologyIn Contemporary Polish Ontology, De Gruyter. pp. 271-294. 2019.
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Essentialism and modern physicsIn Tomasz Bigaj & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics, Brill | Rodopi. 2015.
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IntroductionIn Tomasz Bigaj & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics, Brill | Rodopi. 2015.
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Plugging holes in sophisticated substantivalismIn Antonio Vassallo (ed.), The Foundations of Spacetime Physics: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2022.
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47Counterparts, Essences and Quantified Modal LogicLogic and Logical Philosophy 1-14. forthcoming.It is commonplace to formalize propositions involving essential properties of objects in a language containing modal operators and quantifiers. Assuming David Lewis’s counterpart theory as a semantic framework for quantified modal logic, I will show that certain statements discussed in the metaphysics of modality de re, such as the sufficiency condition for essential properties, cannot be faithfully formalized. A natural modification of Lewis’s translation scheme seems to be an obvious solution …Read more
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15Entanglement and non-factorizabilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (3): 215-221. 2013.Quantum mechanics tells us that states involving indistinguishable fermions must be antisymmetrized. This is often taken to mean that indistinguishable fermions are always entangled. We consider several notions of entanglement and argue that on the best of them, indistinguishable fermions are not always entangled. We also present a simple but unconventional way of representing fermionic states that allows us to maintain a link between entanglement and non-factorizability.
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20How to Justify the Symmetrization Postulate in Quantum MechanicsJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (3): 239-257. 2022.The aim of this paper is to reconstruct and correct one argument in support of the symmetrization postulate in quantum mechanics. I identify the central premise of the argument as a thesis specifying a particular ontic property of quantum superpositions. The precise form of this thesis depends on some underlying assumptions of a metaphysical character. I compare the exchange degeneracy argument with alternative formal arguments for the symmetrization postulate, and I discuss the role and meaning…Read more
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386How Humean is Bohumianism?Foundations of Physics (10): 1-18. 2020.An important part of the influential Humean doctrine in philosophy is the supervenience principle (sometimes referred to as the principle of separability). This principle asserts that the complete state of the world supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its most fundamental components and their spatiotemporal relations (the so-called Humean mosaic). There are well-known arguments in the literature purporting to show that in quantum mechanics the Humean supervenience principle is violated, du…Read more
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21Synchronic and diachronic identity for elementary particlesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3): 1-17. 2020.The main focus of this paper is on the notion of transtemporal identity applied to quantum particles. I pose the question of how the symmetrization postulate with respect to instantaneous states of particles of the same type affects the possibility of identifying interacting particles before and after their interaction. The answer to this question turns out to be contingent upon the choice between two available conceptions of synchronic individuation of quantum particles that I call the orthodox…Read more
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24On Essential Structures and SymmetriesIn Bartłomiej Skowron (ed.), Contemporary Polish Ontology, De Gruyter. pp. 1-24. 2019.
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28On discernibility in symmetric languages: the case of quantum particlesSynthese 198 (9): 8485-8502. 2020.In this paper I consider the question of whether absolute discernibility is attainable in symmetric languages. Simon Saunders has proven that all facts expressible in first-order language with identity can be equivalently stated within its symmetric sublanguage. I use this result to show specifically how particles of the same type can be absolutely discerned in the permutation-invariant language of the quantum theory of many particles.
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88Counterfactuals and Spatiotemporal EventsSynthese 142 (1): 1-19. 2004.One of the basic assumptions of David Lewis's formal semantics of counterfactuals is that the crucial relation of comparative similarity between possible worlds is a linear ordering.Yet there are arguments that when we take into account relativistic features of space-time, this relationshould be only a partial ordering. The first part of the paper deals with the question of how to formulate appropriatetruth conditions for counterfactuals under the supposition of a partial ordering of possible wo…Read more
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10Entanglement of N Distinguishable ParticlesStudies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 27 (40). 2012.
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53Are field quanta real objects? Some remarks on the ontology of quantum field theoryStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 62 145-157. 2018.
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11How to strengthen Bell's theorem using counterfactualsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 41 (1): 58-66. 2009.
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Uwagi o logice trójwartościowejFilozofia Nauki 3. 1997.As it is well known, Jan Lukasiewicz invented his three-valued logic as a result of philosophical considerations concerning the problem of determinism and the status of future contingent sentences. In the article I critically analyse the thesis that the sentential calculus introduced by Lukasiewicz himself actually fulfills his philosophical assumptions. I point out that there are some counterintuitive features of Lukasiewicz three-valued logic. Firstly, there is no clear explanation for adoptin…Read more
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Problem uzasadniania egzystencjalnych założeń teorii (Uwagi na marginesie koncepcji W. V. O. Quine'a)Przeglad Filozoficzny - Nowa Seria 3 (3): 45-53. 1992.
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75Dissecting weak discernibility of quantaStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 50 43-53. 2015.
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28Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics (edited book)Brill | Rodopi. 2015.The book _Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics_ offers various perspectives on the relation and mutual influence between modern physical theories and analytic metaphysics
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9Counterfactuals and non-locality of quantum mechanics: The bedford–stapp version of the GHZ theoremFoundations of Science 12 (1): 85-108. 2007.In the paper, the proof of the non-locality of quantum mechanics, given by Bedford and Stapp (1995), and appealing to the GHZ example, is analyzed. The proof does not contain any explicit assumption of realism, but instead it uses formal methods and techniques of the Lewis calculus of counterfactuals. To ascertain the validity of the proof, a formal semantic model for counterfactuals is constructed. With the help of this model it can be shown that the proof is faulty, because it appeals to the u…Read more
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2The indispensability argument – a new chance for empiricism in mathematics?Foundations of Science 8 (2): 173-200. 2003.In recent years, the so-calledindispensability argument has been given a lotof attention by philosophers of mathematics.This argument for the existence of mathematicalobjects makes use of the fact, neglected inclassical schools of philosophy of mathematics,that mathematics is part of our best scientifictheories, and therefore should receive similarsupport to these theories. However, thisobservation raises the question about the exactnature of the alleged connection betweenexperience and mathemat…Read more
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66On quantum entanglement, counterfactuals, causality and dispositionsSynthese 197 (10): 4161-4185. 2020.The existence of non-local correlations between outcomes of measurements in quantum entangled systems strongly suggests that we are dealing with some form of causation here. An assessment of this conjecture in the context of the collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is the primary goal of this paper. Following the counterfactual approach to causation, I argue that the details of the underlying causal mechanism which could explain the non-local correlations in entangled states strongly dep…Read more
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8Joachim Metallmann-Causality, Determinism and SciencePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 74 53-64. 2001.
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21Causation Without InfluenceErkenntnis 76 (1): 1-22. 2012.David Lewis’s latest theory of causation defines the causal link in terms of the relation of influence between events. It turns out, however, that one event’s influencing another is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for its being a cause of that event. In the article one particular case of causality without influence is presented and developed. This case not only serves as a counterexample to Lewis’s influence theory, but also threatens earlier counterfactual analyses of causation by …Read more
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51In defense of an essentialist approach to Ontic Structural RealismMethode: Analytic Perspective 3 (4): 1-24. 2014.This paper offers a new perspective on the metaphysical doctrine of non-eliminative ontic structural realism by interpreting the relation of ontic dependence in terms of counterfactual identification rather than in terms of numerical identity/distinctness.
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5Władysław Krajewski, 1919–2006International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (1). 2007.This Article does not have an abstract
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Przyczynowość w Szkole Lwowsko-WarszawskiejFilozofia Nauki 2. 1994.The author presents and critically analyses different accounts of causal relation given by the main representants of Lvov-Warsaw School in philosophy. Although there are considerable differences between particular approaches to this problem, it is possible at least to distinguish the key questions, analysed and anwsered by these philosophers. Among them are such questions as: how to define „causal relation”, what are its formal features, what is the space-time localization of the effect and the …Read more
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10This book uses the formal semantics of counterfactual conditionals to analyze the problem of non-locality in quantum mechanics. Counterfactual conditionals enter the analysis of quantum entangled systems in that they enable us to precisely formulate the locality condition that purports to exclude the existence of causal interactions between spatially separated parts of a system. They also make it possible to speak consistently about alternative measuring settings, and to explicate what is meant …Read more
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