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Causation, Robustness, and EPR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Richard A. Healey
Richard A. Healey*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, University of Arizona
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Philosophy Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
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Abstract

In his recent work, Michael Redhead (1986, 1987, 1989, 1990) has introduced a condition he calls robustness which, he argues, a relation must satisfy in order to be causal. He has used this condition to argue further that EPR-type correlations are neither the result of a direct causal connection between the correlated events, nor the result of a common cause associated with the source of the particle pairs which feature in these events. Andrew Elby (1992) has used this same condition as a premise in an independent argument for the conclusion that EPR-type correlations cannot be causally explained (except, perhaps, by a nonlocal hidden variable theory). I wish to argue here that robustness is itself too fragile a notion to support such conclusions.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 282 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1992

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Footnotes

†

I thank Michael Redhead for explaining to me the relation between his earlier and later arguments using robustness; the participants in an informal seminar at the University of Maryland for their constructive reactions to my early thoughts on this matter; Andrew Elby for an illuminating correspondence; Paul Teller for helpful comments on an earlier version; the editors of Philosophy of Science, and especially an anonymous referee, whose detailed comments resulted in significant improvements in the present version.

References

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