Scientism is a Real Problem
Mathematical models can give you rigorous empirical predictions, but you cannot arrive at ontological statements about the nature of reality from mathematical postulates alone.
It is similar to an is/ought dilemma: an argument's conclusions cannot be stronger than its premises. Purely mathematical postulates will only get you to further mathematical conclusions. To say something about the nature of reality, you need an ontological postulate.
An ontological postulate is an assumption about the nature of reality and about how that reality relates to the mathematics. It goes beyond simply stating what the mathematical structure is or what predictions follow from it.
It is sort of like this: if you gave me a body of mathematics, I used it to make empirical predictions, and those predictions turned out to be correct, I would probably turn to you, astonished, and ask: Why are they correct? What does this mathematics mean? What does it represent?
Of course, you can be a pure pragmatist and not care about the answers to those questions at all. But almost no one is. Most people do care about ontological questions, such as "What is real?"
The important point, however, is that ontological postulates are not part of the mathematical framework itself. They are therefore not empirical in the same sense as the predictions generated by the mathematical model, and they cannot necessarily be experimentally proved or falsified.
That does not mean they are arbitrary. They still have to be consistent with the mathematics of the theory, and they still have to be coherent. Even if they cannot be empirically demonstrated, they must still be justified by some other means.
When I talk about "scientism," I am talking specifically about people who conflate ontological postulates with mathematical postulates, treating them as though they were one and the same and as though the former necessarily followed from the latter.
These people then provide no philosophical justification for their ontological postulates because they insist that those postulates have already been proved beyond any reasonable doubt by the mathematics and empirical evidence alone. In fact, if you ask them to justify their ontological assumptions, they will accuse you of being a science denier, a crackpot, or a crank simply for questioning the "scientific community."
Let me give you a simple example: fields.
Mathematically, a field is, roughly speaking, a quantity assigned to every point in some domain, such as 3D physical space. People often assume that these mathematical fields correspond to an ontological field: an invisible substance that permeates space and acts on particles, causing them to behave in particular ways. They therefore speak of fields as entities that exist in the world and have causal effects on particles.
However, it does not automatically follow from the empirical success of the mathematics of fields that we should interpret that mathematics as representing an ontological field, meaning an all-pervading invisible substance.
Suppose you turn on an electromagnet and observe iron filings arranging themselves along the familiar field lines. One interpretation is that the magnetic field acts on the iron filings and causes them to move into that configuration. But another interpretation is that the behavior of the iron filings follows from their own nature. The particles have certain dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain conditions, and the mathematics of fields describes those dispositions.
This is sometimes called a "dispositional" approach in the literature. The "nature" of an object is often described as its "disposition." To talk about the dispositional nature of particles is simply to talk about what those particles do given certain conditions, as a consequence of the laws governing their behavior, without proposing an additional invisible entity "from the outside" that acts upon them and causes them to move.
Notice what I have done here. I have questioned the ontological postulate that the mathematical field corresponds to an ontological field. But I have not questioned the mathematical field itself.
In other words, I am not questioning the efficacy of the mathematical model or its ability to predict what we observe. If I held this view, I would not be denying any empirical predictions made by the model, nor would I be denying any of the scientific evidence supporting those predictions. I would only be questioning what the mathematical model represents about reality.
This is just one example, and a relatively simple one at that. There are much more complicated examples when it comes to the ontological assumptions underlying theories of relativity or quantum mechanics.
Yet questioning an ontological postulate like this will quite often get you flamed, harassed, or attacked by large numbers of people because they equate ontological postulates with mathematical postulates. They then paint you as a "science denier," a "crank," a "flat-earther," or a "crackpot." They may accuse you of being "arrogant" or a "know-it-all" for "daring to question the scientific consensus." A newer insult I've encountered is the claim, made without evidence, that such ideas are the product of "AI psychosis."
If you point out that these personal attacks are unfair and that you'd like a real rebuttal to your argument, they then accuse you of "being upset that we did not automatically believe you without question and actually pushed back," even though their pushback never actually addresses the substance. This is because the person practicing scientism cannot address the substance because they don't know themselves why they believe those ontological postulates. They just take them as a given, without question, so they have no idea how to defend them other than to shut the skeptic down with personal attacks and appeals to popularity without ever actually addressing their argument.
For a real-life example of what I would consider scientism, consider Chad Orzel's TED-Ed talk on Schrödinger's cat. Schrödinger did not believe that the mathematical representation of a quantum superposition of states literally, ontologically, represents a system in multiple states at the same time. Orzel then presents Schrödinger's position as though rejecting this ontological interpretation of quantum superposition amounts to rejecting the science itself.
But Schrödinger obviously was not denying the empirical evidence or the mathematics. He was one of the people who developed the mathematics underlying quantum mechanics. His objection was to the interpretation of what that mathematics says about physical reality.
It is therefore disingenuous to frame disagreement over the ontology of quantum superposition as a rejection of science. Believing that a cat can literally be dead and alive at the same time in ontological reality is not a necessary condition for applying the mathematics of quantum mechanics or for building technologies based upon it.
When I refer to "scientism," then, I am referring to the failure to recognize that the mathematical postulates of scientific models are not, by themselves, sufficient to draw conclusions about the ontology of the world, the "truth" of the world.
To make ontological claims, you also need to put forward and defend ontological postulates. Those postulates are not themselves empirical observations, and they do not automatically follow from the mathematics.
The belief that ontological conclusions flow directly and necessarily from the mathematics is what causes people to become so dogmatic about them. A successful physical theory can effectively be elevated into a kind of religious faith: everyone repeats the associated ontological claims, those who question them are ostracized, and alternative possibilities are dismissed.
Yet when you ask for a philosophical defense of those ontological claims, there may be very little offered because the claims are simply assumed to have been empirically proven, despite the fact that the claims are non-empirical and cannot ever be empirically proven.
The irony is that none of this requires rejecting the science. You can accept the mathematics, accept the empirical evidence, accept the predictive success of the theory, and still ask a fundamentally different question: What, exactly, does this mathematical structure tell us about what reality is?
16 replies
I’ve long held the belief that some people treat common science as a pseudo religion. They believe it to be absolute and unquestionable despite not accepting the limits of scientific observation. Whenever I talk about it online, people will come out of the woodwork to blast me for the perceived blasphemy.
Maybe it’s just human nature to cling to an explanation of things rather than accept that “knowing” anything is actually an extremely difficult thing to do.
To me, those people aren’t worth having a discussion with anyway, just like any similarly zealous religious person.
Yeah, the perspective you're describing is similar to Aristotelianism, and it's unfortunately common. Purely focusing on evidence is not scientific as it's refusing to acknowledge the philosophical framework underpinning an idea, which is just a base assertion of your own implicit framework.
For those who don't know, Aristotle was all about evidence and observation, and mideval scholars were all about him, during the time commonly known as "The Dark Ages." The Copernican Revolution changed that by focusing not just on evidence, but also on theory and frameworks. You can make a geocentric model of the solar system that fits all the evidence (and people did), the problem is that it winds up being extremely convoluted with a ton of arbitrary rules. It is only through a synthesis of theory and evidence that we can start talking about "scientists" as opposed to "scholars."
It is for this reason that we cautiously talk about "interpretations" of QM, because when multiple frameworks are consistent with the evidence, then there's a degree of just considering which one makes "intuitive sense," or which one's assumptions are easiest to accept. And that's more of a philosophical question which is hard to answer objectively and definitively.
But it's not limited to QM. There's a certain kind of person that sees science as always delivering a clear black-and-white answer to everything, with no intellectual flexibility or respect for critical thought, as though being scientifically-minded means denouncing anyone who questions and thinks critically about things. This is product of living in a time when there is so much anti-intellectualism, so many grifters and bullshit peddlers, that there is a somewhat understandable knee-jerk reaction against any questioning of any mainstream ideas. It is one of the ways that far-right ideas indirectly influence the way people think, even among people who reject them.
Much as I hate to "dumb down" the conversation with a nerdy pop culture reference, it reminds me a lot of Warhammer lore. Originally, the Imperium was secularist, but advanced its specific ideological framework through force. The holes in that framework led to a group that questioned and rejected it, but they just started worshipping demons instead. This resulted in the Imperium digging in, demanding worship of the Emperor and hunting down anyone who questioned his authority as "heretics." In a sense, the Chaos-worshippers won in spite of being defeated, because they made the Imperium abandon its ideals for superstition.
In the same way, "scientism" rejects the very ideals and foundations of scientific thought, of critical thinking and questioning and reexamining beliefs, in a reaction against those who use that opportunistically and in bad faith to advance "my opinion is just as valid as your facts." The sort of, "Smoking has been shown to cause lung cancer with 99% confidence" "So you're saying you're not completely sure. Excuse me for a moment while I take this check from the tobacco lobby. Now, as I was saying, I'm just critically examining the mainstream consensus." It is understandable that there is a reaction to that, but its still an overreaction to dismiss all criticism just because some people are criticizing in bad faith. Blind faith in scientific institutions, blanket dismissal of questions and criticisms, is not consistent with scientific ideals.
What is happening in the world right now is not so much a debate as a war. War turns people in to soldiers, and soldiers don't think. Carrying the flame of truth through these dark times is becoming more and more difficult.
As you seem to allude, the ontology of something like magnetism is an unknowable thing in the details of how it works, like whether the magnetic field exists and influences and is influenced by magnetic things, or whether magnetic things can (or "have the disposition to") react to the presence of other magnetic things in their environment, somehow directly; I imagine this as a relation that magnetic things have with each other that influences their movement and electric current.
I agree that disagreement about which one it is is not heresy as you describe. But only when you can name what your ontological view does better than a different one will I start to care about it.
Every "ontological view" seems to only have value for explaining how to understand the empirical science being done. This might sound weird to people who really want to have a belief about how things actually are, but I think it only makes sense to say how things are when it has been verified, and everything below that gets designed by theoretical physicists to make the calculations easier, or by you or other philosophers to try imagining how much sense it would make. When brought to reflect about it, I will always say that I don't hold any absolute beliefs about how things are, I just entertain them when they are consistent and useful to me. I think this makes me a pragmatist.
No, I agree, you should justify your ontological view (if you put forward one at all). But the point is it not empirical. So neither my, nor your, justification can be something settled by evidence. That doesn't mean all explanations are equal, or that explanations cannot be scrutinized. A justification for them should still be provided.
For example, if you think my ontology is unnecessarily excessive in a particular case, you can justify yours over mine by invoking Occam's razor. People do that all the time. That's a philosophical justification that ultimately isn't an empirical one, but it's still an argument. We shouldn't just throw all our ideas out there as if they are all equal and shouldn't be discussed. If one wants to convince others at all, they should still try to convince them with some sort of justification or argument that may not itself be empirical but could still be convincing.
The kind of thing I am talking about here is impossible to verify. The ontological claim of field substantivalism (the idea that the mathematics of fields represents an invisible substance in the world that acts on particles) and the ontological claim of field dispositionalism (the idea that the mathematics of fields represents a description of the dispositions of particles) are both empirically and mathematically equivalent so they lie beyond the possibility of any sort of empirical verification.
Instead, you'd want to give some sort of justification to prefer one approach over another that is not itself empirical. I just prefer field dispositionalism because I find it to be deflationary and generally am not a fan of people proposing invisible substances that cannot ever be observed but are said to act, like the hand of God, from the outside to guide things around and explain what we do observe. Field substantivalism introduces two substances: particles+fields, but field dispositionalism subtracts the fields as a substance of the world (although it doesn't subtract the mathematics of fields), and so you just have particles, and that's what makes it deflationary.
The thing is, because the points of view are mathematically equivalent, then it doesn't contradict with the physicists' desire to make calculations easier.
Thanks for clarifying so much that I now agree
I’m constantly surprised by how uncurious scientists are about what their models let us claim about the world. After doing all that work it seems like waxing poetic about what it can and can’t definitively tell us about the world would be the fun part!
Cognitive archeologist Karenleigh Overmann has a fascinating theory about (sapien) brain evolution and its close relationship with numeracy and literacy that I think might contribute to our frequent conflation between the various techniques we use to quantify/analyze/give meaning to the stuff we encounter and the stuff itself.
This is also how I feel about the field of economics. What a pity and a waste.
Funnily enough, the flat-earther "movement" supposedly started as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of scientism.
Faith in science, as a method, is virtuous. Blind faith in the current scientific consensus is problematic.
Neil deGrasse Tyson sucks for a few reasons; claiming that science has obviated philosophy is one of them. He’s no Carl Sagan.
I wonder where the mute downvoters (counter-)arguments are…
I agree.
Conflating ontological postulates with mathematical postulates is a real problem, but I wish we had a more specific name for that (maybe.. pythagoreanism?), rather than putting it in the bucket of "Scientism".
I'd argue that it's completely ok to to hold the position that "if something doesn't have empirical impact (through scientific method), it follows that it does not have a real, objective existence". One can posit an empirical epistemology and then collapse it into an ontological position. This does not mean they are conflating maths and ontology... but rather that they are positing an ontology that relies on the use of empirical knowledge that may be expressed using maths.
Like.. to follow the example from Orzel's video, one could just as easily argue that Orzel attributes fantastical pseudo-scientific properties to the formalism that are not implicit in the maths themselves. The equations describe empirical observation, and the above position on "scientism" would imply that there must exist something real that has caused this observations, but it does not necessarily imply that the description of the observation, in itself, IS the real objective substance. There can be multiple interpretations of the description, all of them compatible with the empirical evidence and so they would all be possibilities under a scientific view compatible with scientism. Even if only one of them would be actually real.
Even the most hardline, scientifically-minded people do not literalize every piece of math in physics. Modern science is filled with mathematical scaffolding that everyone universally agrees is pure formalism with zero ontological weight.
Like, there are many clever mathematical tricks to deal with "infinites" that nobody really interprets as written.. there are many simplifications, re-contextualization of things into new mathematical gizmos, like certain "potentials", "center of mass", etc. which are essentially just mathematical bookkeeping, abstractions, not real physical entities with ontological existence on their own. I think most "pro-scientism" people would agree with that.
That’s just positivism. Not a big fan. Positivsts will deny that objective realty even exists because it's technically not necessary for empirical predictions. A solipsist could just claim that the laws of physics just refer to the likelihood that they will personally perceive something, as the only true observer, under such and such circumstances, and they could then make empirical predictions just as well as anyone else.
Positivism is the origin of all of the "quantum weirdness." It was heavily influential in late 1800s and early 1900s science, so it played a significant role in the development of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg's initial formulation of it was entirely in terms of observables without any physical state of the system at all independent of observation.
If you point out this problem, they would say it's not a problem at all: you can't observe the system when you're not observing it by definition, so whatever state it has outside of the instantaneous moment of observation is always "hidden" from us by definition. They therefore claim that believing it should have a physical state independent of observation is an unnecessary metaphysical abstraction, and ridicule it as trying to add unnecessary "hidden variables" to quantum mechanics.
Then "quantum weirdness" is born, as we are suddenly not supposed to admit that physical systems have physical states when we are not looking at them, for no other reason than positivists claiming it's not necessary for making empirical predictions.
As Bell pointed out, quantum weirdness has never actually be proven empirically or experimentally. It arises solely as a theoretical choice to delete the physical state of the system independent of observation, justified purely through philosophical arguments, that the physical state independent of observation is "overly metaphysical" because we can't observe it and so technically you don't need it to make an empirical prediction at all.
Thanks for replying!
But what I said is the opposite: the empirical impact is a consequence (or property, if you prefer) that objective reality necessarily has.
So making empirical predictions would be impossible if we did not try to approximate in any way the reality of what objectively ends up happening (ie. whatever real thing is behind the empiric result). Even if we don't fully understand it, we necessarily need some form of approximation (even a distorted/imperfect/incomplete one) in order to make predictions.
I feel you are prematurely jumping the gun with a presuposition. When you say "deny that objective realty even exists", this can be interpreted in multiple ways. But let me know if you meant something else entirely:
Pos.A) You think the position I characterized is non-realist and rejects any real objectivity.
This is definitely not what I was characterizing. What I said is “if something has no empirical impact then it doesn't have real, objective existence”. I did not say that objective existence is not a real thing....
When we say: "if an object is not affected by gravity, then it does not have mass", we are not saying that "mass" in general is not real. We're just pointing out that the effect gravity has on mass is an intrinsic property without which it would not be "mass" anymore as we understand it.
The "scientism" position is saying that objective reality exists, but that it always has empirical impact (even if it might not be observable right now.. we can only be sure it's real when we have enough evidence of its empirical impact).
Pos.B) You meant a particular instance of objective truth has been denied in the past by someone with a "scientistic" position such as the one I characterized, and you think this is a failure of scientific realism.
Mistakes happen. But is there an epistomological approach that leads us to less mistakes when understanding nature?
Also I'm not convinced fully your example applies. Because I'm not sure if “quantum weirdness” is the only explanation of the empirical observations. And I'm not even sure on whether it's really compatible with "scientism" (in the way I characterized it) or not.
For a postulate to be compatible with the statement I gave ealier it'd have to be such that it's existance would have an empirical impact compatible with observations. Whether the existence of “quantum weirdness” as a real thing has an empirical impact is something I'm not so sure about.. because it depends exactly on what do you interpret "quantum weirdness" to be, and how that impact would differ from the one that could be explained by other scientifically-supported interpretations that might be incompatible with "quantum weirdness".
If 2 incompatible positions have the same empirical impact.. then it does not look like those 2 positions would be any different from a "scientism" perspective (ie. either you accept that any of them could be the right one, or you accept none).
And to be clear, when I say "empirical impact" I don't mean direct connection to a direct sensorial input.. most (all?) of the scientific postulates are not directly "observed" but rather indirectly inferred.
I think it'd be controversial to accept at face value any statement that is only pure reason, I'd argue that'd be just a circular logical chain.. of course mathematics can be seen as "truths" but only in an abstract (not a "real") sense that makes them not really that useful on their own to understand the actual objective reality of nature. They are language, they are ways to express / model a particular experiential construct in different terms, but you still need empirical experience to understand the abstraction of that construct and verify 1+1=2 makes any sense beyond it being a convention / terminology for expressing something that you would need previous knowledge to even understand. I'd argue logic is a tool evolution has imprinted in our brains because it was empirically benefitial to our survival. I'd argue that, necessarily, "reason" cannot exist without also having a deep empirically-impacted link.
Mass is not a good example, because mass is an invariable property. The properties where this debate becomes relevant are variable properties, ones which can be placed into a superposition of states, like the position of a particle. If you go look at where a particle is, and find it to be in a particular location... surely that is because it already was in that location before you looked, no?
If you wanted, you could make a complicated argument about how particles aren't fundamental, fields are, and the position measurement is emergent from the field configuration, and only interpreted as a position due to the experimental context, the arrangement of your measuring device.
But that argument only works... if you take the field configuration to have been the thing that pre-existed before you went to measure it.
Something has to pre-exist before you measure, or how can your measurement reveal anything at all???
It definitely is in the way I characterize it. Even John Bell commented on it himself, that the "subjectivism" of quantum mechanics was a "deliberate theoretical choice" not fixed by the actual empirical observations, and that he had commented on a strange phenomenon of all his colleagues trying to cover this fact up. There is a strong hostility towards anyone who believes objective reality exists, which I experienced myself when I got instabanned from the physics subreddit just for citing a paper where Robert Spekkens is a coauthor (the moderator telling me they hate Spekkens for having published papers defending belief in objective reality; even though the paper I cited wasn't even about that and he just happened to be a coauthor on it), but it's been talked about in more professional circles as well.
David Albert has talked about, for example, how he almost got kicked out of his PhD program for wanting to do his thesis on objective reality in regards to quantum mechanics, and the only reason he wasn't kicked out was because one of his professors took pity on him and convinced the other professors that he would assign Albert a thesis, which was totally different, and have Albert do that instead.
Tim Maudlin has also talked about it a lot; that if you wanted to write papers on these topics, you could not find a job a physics department anywhere, because they'd kick you out, and some physicists would find themselves in philosophy departments instead.
You see it among laymen as well. If you say you don't believe that systems have no real configuration when you stop looking at them, and only acquire a real configuration when you look, then you're often accused of being a science denier. Chad Orzel makes exactly this argument in his TedEx Talk, where he bizarrely accuses Schrodinger of being a science denier for not believing that.
Yeah but this is still positivism and still leads to a breakdown of objective reality.
Take the paradox presented by Frauchiger and Renner for example. Two observers make inferences about the state of a system in the past which are mutually incompatible, and thus describe two different, mutually incompatible realities. A realist would say, "one of those observers must be right and one must be wrong, then, because two contradictory things cannot be true at the same time, so we need to clarify what criterion sorts the claims from the two observers."
But the non-realist (most physicists) would say: the state of the system in the past was erased; no observer saw it anyways, so who is right or who is wrong has no empirical impact on what we will actually observe. Therefore, it's not even real; what they are disagreeing about never existed to begin with. That's your position, no?
What's worse is the paradox of Frauchiger and Renner is a thought experiment whereby what is being disagreed with is the mental state of other observers, and so this position of non-realism just collapses into solipsism. The most popular "resolution" to the paradox among academics is to just deny that other observers have invariant mental states in the first place.
Again, then you have no reason to even believe in objective reality. For you, all you believe in is what you see in the instantaneous moment of observation, and the mathematics that allows you to predict what you will see in the next instantaneous moment of observation. Any ontological claim beyond that you'll dismiss that a "circular logical chain."
The "mass" example in question was in relation to "objective reality", that's what I was using the analogue for the statement on "mass" for.
So.. by swapping "mass" for "particle in superposition" are you implying that "objective reality" is better understood not as a single state but a superposition of states? wouldn't that make you the relativist?
You say "Something has to pre-exist before you measure", but that was exactly my point. Mass exists before it's affected by gravity, and yet we are able to say "if gravity doesn't have an effect on it, then it doesn't have mass", because that effect is intrinsic to what we understand "mass" to be.
I don't see the need to involve the concept of superposition here, because as a realist I don't find much sense in it beyond using it as an abstract tool to make approximations for a behavior that we don't yet understand.
Positivism makes no ontological claim, it's a purely epistemological position. So you cannot say positivism itself breaks ontology, although it's posible for positivists to be also relativists (since it doesn't make ontological claims one way or the other, it's compatible with claims that break objective reality).
However, the scientism I characterized does make an ontological claim. But you have still not explained how does it "break" the very thing that it's trying to extract/filter (objective reality).
Yes, but we already established that you are characterizing it differently than how I characterize it, and I already responded to your characterization in my first comment by agreeing with you that that position "is a real problem". What we are discussing now is my characterization (different from yours) and your response to it was "That’s just positivism. Not a big fan".
Please don't switch now back again to a different characterization than the one I provided or otherwise we won't be talking about the same thing.
This is the statement I characterized it with:
“if something doesn’t have empirical impact, then it does not have a real objective existence”
This sentence does not imply that objective existence in general is not real, it just states a specific condition under which things are not real. It defines "objective existence" as something that intrinsically has empirical impact (whether direct or indirect, whether we actively measure it or not), like how mass is intrinsically involved in gravity.
And btw, an actual positivist would not necessarily say that, I think they would rather say:
"if something doesn’t have empirical impact, then we can't meaningfully talk about it"
The difference is subtle but important. It opens the door for them to be relativists. But my earlier characterization was defending scientific realism, since it concerns itself with what is or cannot be "objectively real".
No, that is definitely not my position, nor do I believe that this position follows from the characterization I made of "scientism".
If we DO know that the system existed in the past, then it did have empirical impact, which I expect is what led to the discussion between those 2 people in the first place.
If we DONT know if the system even existed and had no impact, but they still are trying to guess that a system might have existed in the past, or that it might exist in the future.. then still, one of them could be right, but for that person to be right the system must have existed first (or will have to exist later).
The question is flipped from "what state is the system in?" to "did it even exist?". Because if it did exist then under scientific realism, it must have had a real state (whichever that state might have been).
From the scientistic characterization I made earlier it follows that if it exists it must have empiric impact. And even if we are not able to measure / determine the impact directly, if we have enough empirical data to infer that those 2 states are the only possible states, then that might be enough to approximate that at least one of those people must have been right (the confidence in that being true would depend on the data that shows it to be true that only those 2 states are possible and there isn't a 3rd one), even if we might never know with absolute certainty. If the existence of something is more consistent with our empirical experience than its non-existence, then we can infer it might exist, even if we don't have absolute certainty of its actual real existence.
The problem is when we don't have enough data and the mathematical models become so strangely complicated that some Wigner-friendly people think that a different state from just those 2 is possible, arguing that things can actually be in a real "superposition" of existance / non-existance. But this is not something I personally defend. It's just something that those people are proposing as another possibility.
Many (Einstein amongst them) have embraced the idea that quantum states are not objective properties of the world, but rather abstractions / descriptions of information, beliefs, or relations relative to a specific observer.. without rejecting that there ARE real properties and real substance behind them with well defined states.. because as long as there's an empirical result "something" might be causing it.
Again, there can be multiple interpretations for the quantum results that are all compatible with empirical observation.. a super-determinist, or a proponent of bohmian mechanics for example.. they will agree with me that it's possible for one of those 2 people to be right. It's not like there's consensus in science about the way the quantum wave should be interpreted.
The very scientists who formulated the Copenhagen interpretation did not agree with each other.. Copenhagen leaves things so open to interpretation that lots of people disagree in what it even means. And maybe that's why it's so popular.. because it does not take the risk to say anything useful beyond adding some formalisms.. it fails to explain what a measurement is, what the collapse really means (is it only an abstract formulation or a real physical event?), etc. It's a fancy way to say "shut up and calculate".