One of the most persistent refrains in discussions of quantum foundations is the claim that one can, and should, be “just doing physics.” Ontological questions, we are told, are distractions. Philosophy is optional. The responsible physicist calculates, predicts, and refrains from metaphysical speculation.
At first glance, this posture appears modest, even virtuous. It presents itself as a refusal to overreach, a disciplined focus on what can be tested. But this appearance is deceptive.
The claim to be “just doing physics” is not a withdrawal from ontology.
It is a way of doing ontology without admitting it.
1. The Rhetoric of Restraint
The phrase “just doing physics” functions rhetorically rather than descriptively. It signals seriousness, rigour, and epistemic humility. It draws a boundary between respectable work and idle speculation.
But the boundary it draws is not between physics and non-physics.
It is between explicit philosophical reflection and implicit philosophical inheritance.
By refusing to articulate ontological commitments, the physicist does not avoid them. They are simply taken over wholesale from prior theoretical frameworks—usually classical physics—where they were once reasonable, productive, and rarely questioned.
Determinism, separability, locality, observer-independence: these are not experimental results. They are background assumptions that once aligned comfortably with successful theories. When quantum mechanics strains against them, the strain is experienced as conceptual crisis.
2. Calculation Is Not Neutral
Even the injunction to “calculate” presupposes a view about what a physical theory is for. Calculation is not a brute activity; it is a practice embedded in a conception of explanation, relevance, and adequacy.
To treat a theory as merely a predictive device is already to take a stand on its relationship to the world. Instrumentalism is not the absence of ontology. It is an ontological position—one that construes theories as tools rather than descriptions.
The refusal to acknowledge this does not make instrumentalism safer or more rigorous. It makes it dogmatic.
3. Inherited Metaphysics in a Lab Coat
Much of what passes for “common sense” in physics is simply the metaphysics of earlier theories, naturalised through long success. Classical mechanics trained physicists to expect a world composed of well-defined entities with determinate properties evolving in time according to fixed laws.
Quantum mechanics does not conform to this picture. But rather than questioning the picture, physicists often treat the theory as defective for failing to reproduce it.
This inversion is telling. It reveals that the standard of adequacy is not experimental success, but conformity to an inherited image of reality.
What appears as metaphysical caution is, in practice, metaphysical conservatism.
4. The Fantasy of Philosophical Abstinence
Physicists sometimes suggest that philosophy is dispensable because it cannot be tested experimentally. The implication is that only experimentally testable claims deserve serious attention.
But this criterion cannot itself be tested experimentally.
The rejection of philosophy is therefore not a scientific result. It is a philosophical stance—one that denies its own status in order to present itself as methodological necessity.
This denial has consequences. Without philosophical reflection, questions about meaning, explanation, and reality do not disappear. They reappear as intractable disputes, entrenched intuitions, and endless arguments that no data can resolve.
5. Why the Myth Persists
The myth of “just doing physics” persists because it is useful. It protects practitioners from having to justify their ontological preferences. It allows foundational discomfort to be framed as a technical problem awaiting the right formal solution.
It also flatters the self-image of physics as uniquely rigorous: the discipline that alone resists speculation and remains tethered to reality.
But this self-image comes at a cost. It obscures the fact that physics, like any theoretical enterprise, operates within a conceptual framework that shapes what counts as explanation and understanding.
Ignoring that framework does not make it less influential. It makes it less visible.
6. The Price of the Myth
When ontological commitments are denied, debates stagnate. Interpretations proliferate without criteria for comparison. Disagreements harden because their real basis is never addressed.
The result is a peculiar spectacle: intense argument in a domain where no possible observation could force a decision.
This is not a failure of physics.
It is the predictable outcome of refusing to acknowledge the kind of questions being asked.
7. Clearing the Ground
Abandoning the myth of “just doing physics” does not require physicists to become professional philosophers. It requires only that they recognise when they have crossed a boundary—and that they take responsibility for the commitments they make on the far side of it.
Making ontology explicit does not weaken physics. It clarifies it.
It allows quantum mechanics to stand as what it already is: a theory of extraordinary power and scope, whose conceptual difficulties arise not from what it fails to predict, but from what we expect a theory to say about reality itself.
In the next post, we will examine one of the deepest sources of these expectations: the unexamined role of “reality” itself as a silent arbiter in foundational debates—and why treating it as neutral is a mistake.
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