Abstract
A fair amount of recent scholarship has been concerned with correcting a supposedly wrong, but wide-spread, assessment of the consequences of the empirical falsification of Bell-type inequalities. In particular, it has been claimed that Bell-type inequalities follow from “locality tout court” without additional assumptions such as “realism” or “hidden variables”. However, this line of reasoning conflates restrictions on the spatio-temporal relation between causes and their effects (“locality”) and the assumption of a cause for every event (“causality”). It thus fails to recognize a substantial restriction of the class of theories that is falsified through Bell-type inequalities.
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Notes
Henceforth, I subsume also the similar constraints under the term “Bell’s Inequality”.
For an illuminating discussion and a proposal of how to untangle the argument, see [17, Chap. 3].
The complete passage reads: “The EPRB correlations are such that the result of the experiment on one side immediately foretells that on the other, whenever the analyzers happen to be parallel. If we do not accept the intervention on one side as a causal influence on the other, we seem obliged to admit that the results on both sides are determined in advance anyway, independently of the intervention on the other side, by signals from the source and by the local magnet setting.” [7, p. 149]
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Acknowledgments
Research for this article was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project No. 105211-129730). The project was hosted by the University of Bern’s Institute for Philosophy. I thank the principal investigator Gerd Graßhoff as well as Matthias Egg, Paul Näger, Samuel Portmann, Tilman Sauer, Andreas Verdun, Christian Wüthrich, and anonymous referees for detailed comments on the manuscript or other much valuable feedback.
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Wüthrich, A. Local Acausality. Found Phys 44, 594–609 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-014-9796-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-014-9796-y