BOOK REVIEW

Rudolf Seising, Probabilistische Strukturen der Quantenmechanik, Frank-

furt am Main, Peter Lang Verlag, 1996, DM 95.00 (Europäische
Hochschulschriften, Reihe 20, Philosophie; Bd. 500).

The transition from classical to quantum physics early in this centu-

ry is often described as a scientific revolution in which probability was
established as a basic notion for the natural sciences. The indetermin-
ism of natural processes is seen in analogy to examples from elementary
probability theory, like throwing dice or playing roulette, and it is sug-
gested that quantum mechanics (QM) should be understood in just this
way. Opponents of this view, like Einstein and Schrödinger, preferred a
‘realistic’ interpretation. They believed quantum theory to be incomplete;
Schrödinger simply ignored the ‘particle character’ of quantum objects
and developed his wave mechanics. He first interpreted the squared ampli-
tudes of the ‘waves’ as distributions of density of matter and later as
distributions of their electric charge; both interpretations failed. And when
Born interpreted those squared amplitudes as probabilities the resulting
Wahrscheinlichheitsdeutung of QM soon became a firm ingredient of the
Copenhagen interpretation: quantum objects do not obey classical laws of
motion, it is only the probabilities which are causally related.
However, the ‘probabilities’ occurring in QM do not satisfy Kolmogo-
roff’s well known axioms. The double-slit experiment shows that quantum
mechanical ‘probabilities’ are not additive. Birkhoff and von Neumann
even proposed to introduce an new ‘quantum logic’ because the lattice
of quantum mechanical propositions is not distributive, and therefore not
Boolean. This indicates that the ‘probabilistic structure’ of QM is more
complicated than that of Kolmogoroff’s probability spaces.
In the second chapter of Seising’s book this rise of probabilistic think-
ing in QM is described in detail; it is preceded by a similar chapter about
the development of probability theory – up to its axiomatization. Sections
about ‘probability and logic’ contain a discussion of many valued logics
up to fuzzy logic, an interesting argument by Lukasiewicz (1913) relat-
ed to Reichenbach’s ‘probability implication’ (1933), and Alfred Renyi’s
conditional probabilities. But the history of science is not the target. The
first two, more historical chapters lay the ground for the central system-

Erkenntnis 47: 419–421, 1998.

420 BOOK REVIEW

atic arguments. The preparations for the systematic part are rounded up
by a more philosophical section on von Weizsäcker’s ‘logic’ of temporal
propositions.
The systematic part starts from the logico-algebraic work on ‘quan-
tum logic’ by Birkhoff, von Neumann and Mittelstaedt, and the work on
‘quantum probabilities’ by Suppes, Gudder, Varadarajan and others. Seis-
ing argues that neither the ‘logic of probabilities’ nor quantum logic are
many-valued logics.
Next, the logico-algebraic approach is connected with Hilbert space
theory and its developments in functional analysis, and on the basis of
these formal preparations the author presents a new theory-net in the sense
of structuralist philosophy of science. He starts from classical theory of
probability (KWT) and defines ‘quantum probability’ theory (QWT) as
a specialization. By means of a reduction relation a ‘conditional classi-
cal probability’ theory (B-KWT) is obtained, and from this by means of
specialization the ‘conditional quantum probability’ theory. In analogy to
Reichenbach’s ‘classical probability implication’ Seising takes the ‘condi-
tional quantum probability’ as a ‘quantum probability implication’ which
he interprets in the way of von Weizsäcker’s logic of temporal implications:
each pair (a; b) of predictions, where a is in the present and b in the future,
gets assigned a conditional quantum probability. The lattice of predictions
of quantum mechanics is large enough to contain such predictions comple-
mentary to each other. If it is restricted to a Boolean lattice corresponding
to a given observable the quantum probabilities again become classical
probabilities which only apply to predictions of compatible observables.
The conditional quantum probabilities, on the other hand, can be applied
to pairs of complementary predictions. A prediction (in the future) about
the momentum of a quantum object, for example, in this way may get
a quantum probability on the condition that a prediction (in the present)
on the position of the object has a certain quantum probability. In this
context it is important to distinguish between quantum probabilities and
classical probabilities. By means of a theoretization relation Seising intro-
duces the theoretical concepts of the Hilbert space formulation, and then
defines a ‘Hilbert space quantum probability’ (HQWT), and a ‘conditional
Hilbert space quantum probability’ (B-HQWT). Up to this point the recon-
structions deal with established theories from theoretical and mathematical
physics.
In the following, the author shows how the Hilbert space formalism
can be embedded in the formalism of the so-called ‘rigged Hilbert spaces’
(or ‘Gelfand triples’). The latter developed from Dirac’s bra-ket formal-
ism when L. Schwartz introduced his mathematically precise theory of
 BOOK REVIEW 421

distributions in the 50s. Seising defines a further structure for quantum

mechanics: the ‘conditional rigged Hilbert space quantum probability the-
ory’ (B-RHQWT). The central Chapter 7 deals with the intertheoretical
relations of the models defined so far. The relation between the theory-
elements HQWT and B-RHQWT is of special interest. It is claimed to be a
relation of approximative reduction. The claim seems correct even though
the proof of the corresponding theorem is not fully explicit.
Put differently, this central point of the work deals with the connection
between statements about the succession in time of quantum mechanical
states. In classical (Dirac) quantum mechanics such statements can only
be about the probability of a compatible successor state, i.e., a successor
state with respect to some observable compatible with the one that is
presently known. Considering, for instance, the conditional probability of
the momentum-state at t0 , under the condition of the position-state at t, in
classical Hilbert space QM yields the problem that the first (momentum)
state is not an element of Hilbert space but in general only a distribution.
The transition to the more general notion of rigged Hilbert space provides a
formally precise possibility of expressing statements about complementary
observables as the one just considered. The establishment of a relation of
approximative reduction shows that this transition constitutes scientific
progress.
The book may be seen as a successful, structuralist reconstruction of
conditional rigged Hilbert space quantum probability theory. As far as I
know, it also is the first structuralist reconstruction in the field of advanced
quantum theories. The philosophically interesting result is that the func-
tional analytic theoretization of the theory-element B-QWT yielding the
theory-element B-RHQWT yields new theoretical terms which can be
made fruitful for the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the new
theory-element observed quantities and predictions about future experi-
ments are represented by different entities (‘test-functions’ and distribu-
tions). This yields a possibility of incorporating the distinction between
past and future into the probabilistic structure of quantum mechanics. This
takes up von Weizsäcker’s ‘logic of temporal propositions’ on a high level
of mathematical abstraction.
Manuscript received February 27, 1997
Institut für Philosophie, WOLFGANG BALZER
Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Ludwigstr. 31
80539 München
Germany