David Lewis meets John bell

Philosophy of Science 59 (1):26-43 (1992)
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Abstract

The violation of the Bell inequality means that measurement-results in the two wings of the experiment cannot be screened off from one another, in the sense of Reichenbach. But does this mean that there is causation between the results? I argue that it does, according to Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation and his associated views. The reason lies in his doctrine that chances evolve by conditionalization on intervening history. This doctrine collapses the distinction between the conditional probabilities that are used to state screening off, and the counterfactuals with chance consequents that are used to state lack of causation. I briefly discuss ways to evade my argument

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Jeremy Butterfield
Cambridge University

Citations of this work

Causation and manipulability.James Woodward - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Discovering Quantum Causal Models.Sally Shrapnel - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (1):1-25.
Reichenbach's common cause principle and quantum field theory.Miklós Rédei - 1997 - Foundations of Physics 27 (10):1309-1321.
Relativity, Quantum Entanglement, Counterfactuals, and Causation.Luke Fenton-Glynn & Thomas Kroedel - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (1):45-67.

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References found in this work

On the Plurality of Worlds.David Lewis - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (3):388-390.
Counterfactuals.David Lewis - 1973 - Foundations of Language 13 (1):145-151.
Introduction” to his.D. Lewis - 1986 - Philosophical Papers 2.
Incompleteness, non locality and realism. A prolegomenon to the philosophy of quantum mechanics.Michael Redhead - 1987 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 180 (4):712-713.

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