Interpretation as the Myth of the Missing Truth

For more than a century, quantum mechanics has been haunted by the so-called measurement problem: how do quantum superpositions become classical outcomes when observed? Physicists and philosophers have treated this as a matter of interpretation: which story about reality best explains the collapse from multiplicity to singularity? The Many Worlds interpretation says: all possible outcomes occur, just in different branches of reality. The hidden-variables camp insists: something unseen fills the gaps. Collapse models add mechanisms to force singularity into being. Each interpretation shifts the pieces, but none solves the riddle.

Relational ontology reframes the entire situation. The problem is not a gap between quantum formalism and classical reality. The problem is the assumption that there is an uninterpreted reality waiting to be matched by a privileged interpretation. But reality, as construed, is never outside interpretation — it is construal. The so-called “measurement problem” is simply the moment we notice that construal is constitutive, not supplementary.

Superposition is not an unresolved paradox in the world. It is the way a system of potential is construed before an instance is actualised. Collapse is not a physical discontinuity but a perspectival cut: a shift from theory to event, from potential to instance. The “observer” is not an external witness but the alignment of construal itself.

Thus the “myth of interpretation” is the belief that we are waiting for the right story to map theory onto reality. In fact, reality is always already constituted by the stories we cut into it. There is no missing stroke of inspiration that will finally reveal the truth of quantum mechanics. The truth is that truth itself is an effect of construal.