The Uninvited Guest: ‘Local Realism’ and the Bell Theorem

Abstract

The Western philosophical thought has learnt since its very early days that the idea that there is a world out there – a world whose properties are (at least partially) independent from what we might think of them and even from our very attempts to have access to them – has a peculiar status. Although for some the idea of a world out there is too obviously right in order to waste time to argue in favour of it, whereas for others it is too obviously wrong in order to waste time to try to refute it, most philosophers would agree that a more or less sophisticated array of arguments is needed in order to make realism (or anti-realism, or any variant that lies in the continuum between these two poles) a plausible position. This long and honoured story, however, seems to be forgotten when considered from the standpoint of the foundations of contemporary physics. Surprisingly enough, the world-out-there-idea has recently acquired to the eyes of many physicists and philosophers of physics the status of a pathology, to be recognized as such and to be eradicated as soon as possible.