Losing Your Marbles in Wavefunction Collapse Theories

Peter Lewis ([1997]) has recently argued that the wavefunction collapse theory of GRW (Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber [1986]) can only solve the problem of wavefunction tails at the expense of predicting that arithmetic does not apply to ordinary macroscopic objects. More specifically, Lewis argues that the GRW theory must violate the enumeration principle: that ‘if marble 1 is in the box and marble 2 is in the box and so on through marble n, then all n marbles are in the box’ ([1997], p. 321). Ghirardi and Bassi ([1999]) have replied that it is meaningless to say that the enumeration principle is violated because the wavefunction Lewis uses to exhibit the violation cannot persist, according to the GRW theory, for more than a split second ([1999], p. 709). On the contrary, we argue that Lewis’s argument survives Ghirardi and Bassi’s criticism unscathed. We then go on to show that, while the enumeration principle can fail in the GRW theory, the theory itself guarantees that the principle can never be empirically falsified, leaving the applicability of arithmetical reasoning to both microand macroscopic objects intact. 1 Wavefunction Collapse Theories and the Tails Problem 2 Lewis’s Counting Anomaly 3 Can the Counting Anomaly Be Avoided? 4 Is the Counting Anomaly Ever Manifest? 5 Is Suppressing the Manifestation of Anomalies Enough? Forthcoming in The British Journal for Philosophy of Science, December 1999.