Beyond Causal Explanation: Einstein’s Principle Not Reichenbach’s |
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Authors: | Michael Silberstein William Mark Stuckey Timothy McDevitt |
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Affiliation: | 1.Department of Philosophy, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA;2.Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;3.Department of Physics, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA;4.Department of Mathematical Sciences, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA; |
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Abstract: | Our account provides a local, realist and fully non-causal principle explanation for EPR correlations, contextuality, no-signalling, and the Tsirelson bound. Indeed, the account herein is fully consistent with the causal structure of Minkowski spacetime. We argue that retrocausal accounts of quantum mechanics are problematic precisely because they do not fully transcend the assumption that causal or constructive explanation must always be fundamental. Unlike retrocausal accounts, our principle explanation is a complete rejection of Reichenbach’s Principle. Furthermore, we will argue that the basis for our principle account of quantum mechanics is the physical principle sought by quantum information theorists for their reconstructions of quantum mechanics. Finally, we explain why our account is both fully realist and psi-epistemic. |
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Keywords: | EPR correlations, relativity principle, principle explanation, Reichenbach’ s Principle, retrocausality, locality, contextuality, no preferred reference frame, causal modelling, no-signalling, quantum information theory, reconstructions of quantum mechanics, Tsirelson bound, realist psi-epistemic |
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