A defining criterion of what counts as a version of the epistemic conception of states is to allow that agents which are differently situated with respect to one and the same quantum system and have different epistemic relations to it may (and perhaps even should) legitimately assign different quantum states to it. As formulated by Rudolf Peierls, one of its key proponents, the quantum states assigned to the same system by different agents “may differ as the nature and amount of knowledge may differ.”[^3]

Accounts that are based on the epistemic conception of states must be non-ontic in that they cannot acknowledge any such thing as an agent-independent “true” quantum state of a quantum system—a state it “is in”—, for if such a state exists, assigning precisely that state is the one and only correct way of assigning a quantum state and assigning any other state counts as wrong. Any account that accepts the notion of a “quantum state a quantum system is in”—and does not interpret it as a sometimes harmless yet strictly speaking misleading *façon de parler*—does not qualify as an epistemic account of quantum states in the sense of the present paper.

Just like any other take 