A Topos Perspective on the Kochen-Specker Theorem: IV. Interval Valuations

Butterfield, Jeremy and Isham, Chris (2002) A Topos Perspective on the Kochen-Specker Theorem: IV. Interval Valuations.

Abstract

We extend the topos-theoretic treatment given in previous papers of assigning values to quantities in quantum theory. In those papers, the main idea was to assign a sieve as a partial and contextual truth-value to a proposition that the value of a quantity lies in a certain set D of real numbers. Here we relate such sieve-valued valuations to valuations that assign to quantities subsets, rather than single elements, of their spectrum (we call these interval valuations). There are two main results. First, there is a natural correspondence between these two kinds of valuation, which uses the notion of a state's support for a quantity (Section 3). Second, if one starts with a more general notion of interval valuation, one sees that our interval valuations based on the notion of support (and correspondingly, our sieve-valued valuations) are a simple way to secure certain natural properties of valuations, such as monotonicity (Section 4).