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13.00 - Monday, 3 October 2005

VUB - room D.1.08

 

Statistical Independence : Locality or Rationality ??

Soazig Le Bihan

Abstract: In Factorisability of probabilities plays a central role in various derivations of Belltype theorems. John Earman (1986) has shown, in "Locality, Non-Locality and Action at a Distance: A Skeptical Review of Some Philosophical Dogmas" that the widely accepted construal of the factorisation condition as a locality condition, usually justified by appeal to Reichenbach’s principle of common cause (PCC), can be denied through a rigorous space-time approach. In this approach, the PCC, and factorisability, appear to be epistemological requirements about the rationality of explanations, disconnected from any notion of physical locality. Further, the factorisation condition is well-known to divide up into two distinct requirements: outcome and parameter independence. A space-time approach to these requirements now allows us to disentangle what can count as a locality vs rationality condition. We argue that, whereas parameter independence appears to be a good candidate for a locality condition, outcome independence rather appears to be a rationality condition.

 

Soazig Le Bihan: LHPS - Archives Poincare, University of Nancy 2, Bielefeld University.