The EPR controversy

Marie-Christine Combourieu

Mauricio Suárez, Iñaki San Pedro

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 90's 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 generalized 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 corrleations. But we go on to take issue with some pronouncements on EPR by defenders of the CMC.

Philippe H. Eberhard

Li jun Tian

Controversies between Einstein and Niels Bohr about the interpretation of quantum theory have been a classical case in the twentieth-century physics.Through the case study of controversies that been derived from uncertainty princple and EPR paper between Einstein and Niels Bohr,we can find that behind the great controversies concerning great scientific revolutions,it must be the controversies of the fundamental problem of philosophy.In these scientific controversies,the logical inference become highly effective way to argumentation,thus they become the powerful weapons for scientists to win in scientific controversies.Though scientists utilize various rhetoric arguments in dispute,the rhetoric argument must be built on the base of logical inference.For this reason,there is a necessary tension between logical inference and rhetoric argument.