Michael Miller (Pittsburgh) “What kind of thing is a quantum field?”

Standard approaches to the interpretation of physical theories require a structurally unambiguous characterization of the models of a theory. In this talk I argue that the nature of the empirical support for quantum field theory does not warrant commitment to one particular type of structure as constitutive of the theory. Rather, the empirical adequacy of some models of the theory warrants commitment to a precisely delimited class of structures. I develop an approach to semantics for physical theories which accommodates this type of constrained structural ambiguity, and I illustrate the efficacy of the proposal by discussing what is meant physically by the term “quantum field”.

Michael Miller is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh working in the foundations of quantum field theory.