Non-locality Reconsidered

Abstract

Adopting a non-ontic account of quantum states does not address all the challenges raised in the literature concerning the alleged incompatibility between quantum theory and special relativity. According to Bell, for instance, there is ‘an apparent incompatibility, at the deepest level, between the two fundamental pillars of contemporary theory’ (Bell [2004], p. 172) (where by the ‘two fundamental pillars’ he means quantum theory and relativity theory), which is not merely due to the difficulty of reconciling collapse with relativity. This difficulty, as Bell acknowledges, is rather easily avoided by ‘not grant[ing] beable status to the wave function’ (Bell [2004], p. 53; for more on Bell’s notion ‘beable’ see Section 10.2), or, in other words, by adopting a non-ontic account of quantum states.