Abstract
It is still a matter of controversy whether the Principle of the Common Cause (PCC) can be used as a basis for sound causal inference. It is thus to be expected that its application to quantum mechanics should be a correspondingly controversial issue. Indeed the early 1990s saw a flurry of papers addressing just this issue in connection with the EPR correlations. Yet, that debate does not seem to have caught up with the most recent literature on causal inference generally, which has moved on to consider the virtues of a generalised PCC-inspired condition, the so-called Causal Markov Condition (CMC). In this paper we argue that the CMC is an appropriate benchmark for debating possible causal explanations of the EPR correlations. But we go on to take issue with some pronouncements on EPR by defenders of the CMC.
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Notes
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And several philosophers have gone as far as to defend that causality and determinism in fact exclude each other. See (Hoefer, 2004) for a recent example.
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(Einstein et al., 1935).
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See (Maudlin, 1994) for a critical discussion.
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(Redhead, 1987).
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(Redhead, 1987, 102–103).
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For a discussion see (Healey, 1992b).
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(Healey, 1992a, b).
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We will not here assess this claim, since the aim of the paper is not to evaluate but to compare robustness and the Causal Markov Condition, and to show that they face similar difficulties and challenges.
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(Healey, 1992b, 183–184).
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Cf. (Redhead, 1987, vi).
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Cf. (Shimony, 1984).
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Cf. (Healey, 1992a, b) and (Cartwright and Jones, 1991).
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See (Hausman and Woodward, 1999, 523). Note that Hausman and Woodward’s definition is distinct in some significant ways from the original in Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines (2000 [1993], 29) – see (Steel, 2006) for a discussion. The distinction makes no difference to our argument, however, so we ignore it here – and instead stick to Hausman and Woodward’s definition for consistency.
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A referee pointed out that the role of total or partial cause in these proofs is to make sure that d can only cause a via b in the case of total cause, and via {c, b} in the case of partial cause. Indeed that would be an alternative definition of Healey’s terms.
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(Hausman and Woodward, 1999).
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(Steel, 2005).
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One of us has argued against this common lore (Suárez, 2007). However, these arguments do not vindicate the PCC as usually stated but a very different reformulation. We will not review this literature here, but instead refer the reader to that paper.
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Cf. (Hausman and Woodward, 1999, 545).
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The qualification of values or probabilities is needed to account for probabilistic causality, which Hausman and Woodward define as deterministic causation of probabilities (Hausman and Woodward, 1999, 570).
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See e.g. (Cartwright, 2002).
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The observation is consistent with our results in the previous section, since we showed that CMC entails robustness but not that modularity entails robustness – the main difference is clear now.
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They refer extensively to an old paper by Skyrms that defends this view (Skyrms, 1984); it is worth mentioning that the literature on EPR has moved on a very great deal in the last two decades, particuarly on the physics side. Quantum entanglement was not then the area of intense research among physicists that it has become now, and Skyrms’ views were much more entrenched twenty five years ago than they are now among both physicists and philosophers.
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For a preliminary account see (Cartwright and Suárez, 2000).
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See (Cushing, 1994, pp. 82–95) for a very nice review.
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Cf. (Steel, 2005).
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By pseudo deterministic system we mean a system with causes that do not fix the ocurrence of all their effects, but that can nonetheless be ‘embedded in another more complete graph [...] in which the parents of the given effect are sufficient to fix the value of the effect’. (Cartwright, 1999). For a discussion and a reference to the notorious cheap but dirty factory example of the presumed failure of CMC in indeterministic systems see (Cartwright, 1993).
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(Steel, 2006).
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(Bell, 1982).
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(Dewdney et al., 1988).
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(Holland, 1993).
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The full details can be found in (Bohm and Hiley, 1993, Chapter 10). See (Berkovitz, 2007, Section 5.3.1) for a brief review.
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(Dewdney et al., 1988, pp. 537–539); (Holland, 1993, Chapters 10 and 11).
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In response to our reasoning at this point Steel has retorted as follows (private correspondence): ‘I am not assuming that EPR is a violation of the CMC if Bohm’s theory is correct. Rather, I am making the following conditional claim: if locality is a necessary condition for causation, then EPR is a violation of the CMC according to Bohm’s theory’. If this is Steel’s more considerate view, it seems to us to worsen his position. For note that the truth of the antecedent of the above conditional claim would make causation impossible by definition on almost any interpretation or version of quantum mechanics – since some form of non-locality is required in any case. But, worse still, the antecedent is false precisely in Bohm’s theory, irrespective of interpretation: In both the minimal and the causal interpretations causation is certainly possible, and yet in both cases the theory is explicitly non-local. So the conditional above, if read as a material implication, would turn out to be vacuously true and uninformative about the actual status of CMC in Bohmian mechanics. (If read as an indicative conditional, Steel’s statement is just false).
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Acknowledgements
A preliminary draft of this paper was circulated in discussion paper form at the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics (M. Suárez and I. San Pedro, “EPR, Robustness and the Causal Markov Condition”, LSE Philosophy Papers PP/04/07, 19 August 2007). We would like to thank all those who offered comments and suggestions, in particular Daniel Steel and Carl Hoefer. Research towards this paper has been funded throughout by research project HUM2005-01787-C01-03 of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. We would like to thank the members of its associated 2005 reading group on causal inference, as well as three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.
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Suárez, M., San Pedro, I. (2011). Causal Markov, Robustness and the Quantum Correlations. In: Suárez, M. (eds) Probabilities, Causes and Propensities in Physics. Synthese Library, vol 347. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9904-5_8
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