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EPR: The Correlations are Still A Mystery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Frederick M. Kronz
Frederick M. Kronz*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

This paper is a critical discussion of a recent article by Bas van Fraassen (1985) in which he suggests the following view: we should admit that we have no explanation of the EPR correlations, but refuse to consider the correlations as mysterious nevertheless (pp. 126–128). We shall focus on just three of the claims made by van Fraassen in support of this view. The three claims are these:

  1. (1) The EPR correlations cannot be explained by signals being transmitted from one component of an EPR compound to the other (pp. 114–115).

  2. (2) There is, in the EPR situation, no empirically verifiable action at a distance (pp. 124–126).

  3. (3) The demand for an explanation of the EPR correlations is similar to the Aristotelian demand of the post-Newtonian proponents of the law of inertia to explain what keeps a body moving if there are no forces impressed on it (pp. 126–128).

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 631 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am especially grateful to Bas van Fraassen and the referee for Philosophy of Science, and to my colleagues Herb Hochberg, Hans Kamp, Dan Bonevac, and Nicholas Asher for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

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