Erwin Schrödinger’s project began as a rebellion against discontinuity. The quantum jumps of Bohr and the abstract operators of Heisenberg struck him as both inelegant and metaphysically offensive. His answer was to restore classical intuition in a new guise: a smooth, continuous wave evolving deterministically according to a differential equation.
Where Heisenberg had replaced particles with algebraic structure, Schrödinger replaced them with a wave distributed across space. His early papers speak with the confidence of someone who believed he had recovered physical reality itself: a literal wave of matter. Even when later forced to concede that the wave could not represent a material density in ordinary space, Schrödinger never accepted Born’s probabilistic turn. For him, the wave function was not a mathematical device of prediction; it was a picture of what the world is.
From a relational ontological point of view, this is precisely where the trouble begins. Schrödinger treats the wave function as an instance—a depiction of the actual state of the world—when in fact it is a system: a representation of structured possibility, a theory of possible instances.
This confusion between system and instance is what later gives rise to the famous cat paradox. It appears paradoxical only because Schrödinger’s own presuppositions smuggle in a substrate realism the mathematics itself does not support. The wave function is a grammar of potential—an abstract relational system specifying what kinds of phenomena can be actualised. It is not a physical object, not a metaphysical field, and not a glassy half-reality from which determinate states mysteriously precipitate.
The relational concern is not with the details of wave mechanics but with what Schrödinger thought he was describing. He assumed that the wave provides a picture of what lies behind phenomena. But a system is not a picture; it is a space of construals. When Schrödinger insists on a literal wave underpinning phenomena, he mistakes potential as substance. He attempts to read the grammar of meaning potential as if it were the ontology of the world.
His cat thought experiment emerges naturally from this misalignment. If the wave function depicts reality, and if that wave includes superpositions, then one must concede that macroscopic states—living, dead, neither, both—inhere in the world. But this absurdity is an artefact of the initial representational confusion. For relational ontology, there is no superposed cat. There is only the systemic description, which expresses the structured potential before any perspectival cut is made, and the actualised phenomenon, which is the phenomenon as construed. The contradiction arises only if we treat the structured potential as though it were itself an actualised event.
Relational ontology clarifies the situation:
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Schrödinger’s wave function belongs to the systemic side of the cut.
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The cat belongs to the instance side.
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The paradox is born of trying to read the former as if it were the latter.
In this light, Schrödinger’s resistance to collapse is not a philosophical commitment to continuity but a category error—a refusal to recognise that systemic potential and actualised phenomena are not two temporal phases of a single physical process. They are two perspectives: the theory of possible instances and the construed event that becomes meaningful within that theory.
Schrödinger hoped the wave would restore a unified, continuous world-picture. Relational ontology shows instead that the wave is not a world-picture at all. It is the formal structure of possibility from which world-pictures can be drawn.
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