PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association
Critique of the Papers of Fine and Suppes
Abner Shimony
Abstract
‘Bell's Theorem’ is the collective name for a family of arguments, which more accurately should be referred to as ‘Theorems of Bell's Type’, all being variants of the remarkable argument given by J. S. Bell (1964). All of these arguments have the format E & H → I, where E is a description of a type of experimental setup involving pairs of particles emitted from a common source, H is a physical hypothesis which typically expresses some version of “realism” and some version of “locality”, and I is an inequality concerning correlations between particles of a pair. There are differences among theorems of Bell's type regarding the details of the inequality I , which are important in actually carrying out experimental tests. There are differences regarding the arrow—i.e., the procedure whereby I is inferred from E & H.