The question “what is an interpretation?” is often intertwined with the perhaps even harder question “what is a scientific theory?”. Given this proximity, we try to clarify the first question to acquire some ground for the latter. The quarrel between the syntactic and semantic conceptions of scientific theories occupied a large part of the scenario of the philosophy of science in the 20th century. For many authors, one of the two currents needed to be victorious. We endorse that such debate, at least in the terms commonly expressed, can be misleading. We argue that the traditional notion of “interpretation” within the syntax/semantic debate is not the same as that of the debate concerning the interpretation of quantum mechanics. As much as the term is the same, the term “interpretation” as employed in quantum mechanics has its meaning beyond (pure) logic. Our main focus here lies on the formal aspects of the solutions to the measurement problem. There are many versions of quantum theory, many of them incompatible with each other. In order to encompass a wider variety of approaches to quantum theory, we propose a different one with an emphasis on pure formalism. This perspective has the intent of elucidating the role of each so-called “interpretation” of quantum mechanics, as well as the precise origin of the need to interpret it.

问题“什么是解释？” 常常与也许更难的问题“什么是科学理论？”交织在一起。鉴于这种接近，我们试图澄清第一个问题，为后者获得一些基础。科学理论的句法和语义概念之间的争论占据了 20 世纪科学哲学场景的很大一部分。对于许多作者来说，这两种潮流中的一种需要取得胜利。我们同意这种辩论，至少在通常表达的术语中，可能具有误导性。我们认为，句法/语义辩论中的传统“解释”概念与关于量子力学解释的辩论不同。只要术语相同，量子力学中使用的术语“解释”具有超越（纯）逻辑的含义。我们在这里的主要重点在于测量问题解决方案的形式方面。量子理论有许多版本，其中许多版本彼此不兼容。为了涵盖更广泛的量子理论方法，我们提出了一种不同的方法，重点是纯形式主义。这种观点旨在阐明量子力学的每个所谓“解释”的作用，以及解释它的需要的确切起源。