Counterfactual Reasoning, Realism and Quantum Mechanics: Much Ado About Nothing?

Abstract

I show why old and new claims on the role of counterfactual reasoning for the EPR argument and Bell’s theorem are unjustified: once the logical relation between locality and counterfactual reasoning is clarified, the use of the latter does no harm and the nonlocality result can well follow from the EPR premises. To show why, after emphasizing the role of incompleteness arguments that Einstein developed before the EPR paper, I critically review more recent claims that equate the use of counterfactual reasoning with the assumption of a strong form of realism and argue that such claims are untenable.