Contemporary Perspectivism as a Framework of Scientific Inquiry in Quantum Mechanics and Beyond

TL;DR

The paper develops contemporary perspectivism as an endo-theoretic framework for scientific inquiry, arguing that knowledge is always perspective-bound and that a global description requires assembling many local, context-dependent Boolean frames. It formulates a three-part architecture (conceptual, methodological, semantic) and demonstrates, using quantum mechanics, how a non-Boolean quantum event structure can be faithfully represented by a multilevel network of Boolean perspectives linked through category-theoretic structures such as spectral sieves and presheaf-based adjunctions. A central result is the Boolean frames–quantum adjunction, with a right adjoint providing local Boolean frames and a left adjoint performing perspectival synthesis via colimits, thereby recovering the global quantum structure from local data. The approach provides a general pattern for scientific inquiry in complex trans-perspectival phenomena and contrasts with Rovelli’s relational interpretation, offering a rigorous, context-sensitive account of truth and knowledge in quantum theory and beyond.

Abstract

Contemporary perspectivism is viewed as a framework of scientific inquiry concerning the origin, generation and systematization of scientific knowledge of nature by focusing on the conditions under which such knowledge may arise in perspectivist terms and investigating the essential ramifications of these conditions. To this end, we develop the conceptual, methodological and semantic framework of contemporary perspectivism according to the norms of the proposed endo-theoretic approach. Implementation of the preceding three-fold scheme in quantum mechanics implies that the global structure of a quantum algebra of events can be consistently comprehended through a multilevel structure of locally variable Boolean perspectives, interconnected in a category-theoretic environment, yielding jointly all the information encoded in the former. In this respect, the proposed approach validates the perspectivist/contextual nature of quantum mechanics at a fundamental level of discourse. Furthermore, due to its general character, it may acquire the form of a theoretical pattern of scientific inquiry in the natural sciences, especially when dealing with complex trans-perspectival phenomena, the analysis of which requires the use of information resulting from more than one perspective. Finally, in the appendix, we provide a concise comparative assessment between our perspectivist framework of quantum theory and Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.