 Despite its status as a core part of contemporary physics, there is no consensus among physicists or philosophers of physics on the question of what, if anything, the empirical success of quantum theory is telling us about the physical world. This gives rise to the collection of philosophical issues known as “the interpretation of quantum mechanics”. One should not be misled by this terminology into thinking that what we have is an uninterpreted mathematical formalism with no connection to the physical world. Rather, there is a common operational core that consists of recipes for calculating probabilities of outcomes of experiments performed on systems subjected to certain state preparation procedures. What are often referred to as different “interpretations” of quantum mechanics differ on what, if anything, is added to the common core. Two of the major approaches, hidden-variables theories and collapse theories, involve formulation of physical theories distinct from standard quantum mechanics; this renders the terminology of “interpretation” even more inappropriate.