Realism and the epistemic view of quantum states*

The idea that quantum states reflect only an observers knowledge/beliefs/information about the world has a long history, with a wide variety of strong arguments having been proffered in its favour. The challenge for an advocate of this position, however, is to identify what we can deduce is ``really going on'' out there. There seem to three main paths proponents of the epistemic view have followed in trying to extract such a narrative from quantum theory. I will explain how the most naive such path--that quantum states can be associated with standard (probabilistic) uncertainty about some (arbitrary) real states of the world--is not tenable under some extremely mild assumptions about how any theory of reality must treat independent experiments. I will then overview the other two paths and what I see as the challenges they face.