Joanna, Luc (2025) What are the bearers of hidden states? On an important ambiguity in the formulation of Bell's theorem. [Preprint]

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Abstract

One of the conclusions that Bell drew from his famous inequality was that any hidden variable theory that satisfies Local Causality is incompatible with the predictions of Quantum Mechanics for Bell's Experiment. However, Local Causality does not appear in the derivation of Bell's inequality. Instead, two other assumptions are used, namely Factorizability and Settings Independence. Therefore, in order to establish the mentioned Bell's conclusion, we need to relate these two assumptions to Local Causality. The prospects for doing so turn out to depend on the assumed location of the hidden states that appear in Bell's inequality. In this paper, I consider the following two views on such states: (1) that they are states of the two-particle system at the moment of preparation, and (2) that they are states of thick slices of the past light cones of measurements. I argue that straightforward attempts to establish Bell's conclusion fail in both approaches. Then, I consider three refined attempts, which I also criticise, and I propose a new way of establishing Bell's conclusion that combines intuitions underlying several previous approaches.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Joanna, Luc joanna.luc.poczta@gmail.com
Keywords:	quantum mechanics; Bell's inequality; Bell's theorem; locality; nonlocality; Local Causality
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
Depositing User:	Joanna Luc
Date Deposited:	17 Mar 2026 12:26
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2026 12:26
Item ID:	28654
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Physics Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
Date:	29 January 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/28654

Available Versions of this Item

• What are the bearers of hidden states? On an important ambiguity in the formulation of Bell's theorem. (deposited 29 Jan 2025 14:06)
  • What are the bearers of hidden states? On an important ambiguity in the formulation of Bell's theorem. (deposited 17 Mar 2026 12:26) [Currently Displayed]

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