An Onto-Epistemological Interpretation of Quantum Measurement

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is standardly framed as a technical puzzle: how does the deterministic Schrodinger evolution give way to the definite, probabilistic outcomes that experiments produce? This paper argues that the problem also invites a prior philosophical question– not what mechanism closes the gap, but what kind of event a quantum measurement is. The central proposal is that measurement is best understood as an onto-epistemological event: a structured interaction in which physical determination and the conditions of knowledge are mutually implicated rather than sequentially ordered. This is an interpretive thesis, not a consequence derived from the formalism alone, and it is advanced with that limitation held in full view throughout. The argument proceeds in four stages. I first review the formal tension between unitary evolution and the Born rule. I then examine Bohr, Heisenberg, and Wheeler, identifying their shared resistance to describing quantum phenomena independently of the conditions that produce them. Third, I draw on Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, and on Heidegger’s contrast between calculative and meditative thinking, as conceptual resources–offered as interpretive lenses, not as physical evidence. Finally, I assess what decoherence and statistical mechanics genuinely explain, attending carefully to the distinction between irreversibility of macroscopic records and the question of individual outcome actualization, and to the difference between fundamental constraints on information extraction and the platform-dependent limitations of particular experimental architectures. Throughout, the principal competing interpretations–Everettian, decoherence-based, and epistemic– are engaged with the aim of showing not that they fail, but that each preserves, in its own way, the relational structure the participatory account is designed to bring into view.