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Are Prohibitions of Superluminal Causation by Stochastic Einstein Locality and by Absence of Lewisian Probabilistic Counterfactual Causality Equivalent?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Miklós Rédei
Miklós Rédei*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Natural Sciences, Loránd Eötvös University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Loránd Eötvös University, H-1088 Budapest, Rákóczi út 5., Hungary.
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Abstract

Butterfield's (1992a,b,c) claim of the equivalence of absence of Lewisian probabilistic counterfactual causality (LC) to Hellman's stochastic Einstein locality (SEL) is questioned. Butterfield's assumption on which the proof of his claim is based would suffice to prove that SEL implies absence of LC also for appropriately given versions of these notions in algebraic quantum field theory, but the assumption is not an admissible one. The conclusion must be that the relation of SEL and absence of LC is open, and that they may be independent.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 608 - 618
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

†

This work was supported in part by the Hungarian National Foundation for Scientific Research, grant no. 1900, and was completed while I was staying on a TEMPUS Individual Mobility Grant in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen. I am indebted to Professor J. D. North and Professor D. Atkinson for their hospitality while staying in Groningen. I also wish to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Special thanks go to Dr. J. Butterfield for providing me with the manuscripts of his forthcoming works and for valuable discussions and correspondence.

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