Abstract

Essay content differs substantially from presentation! In order to motivate his claim that the violation of the Bell inequalities forces us into a certain kind of holism, Howard develops a formal equivalence proof supposed to ground the stochastic “outcome independence” condition, the assumption of which is necessary for the derivation of the inequalities, in a physical principle, the separability principle. I will discuss several criticisms of Howard's equivalence proof that focus on the sufficiency of the separability principle for outcome independence. I will argue that, while none of these criticisms succeeds, they do constrain the possible form of Howard's argument.