Rethinking Nonlocality: Locality, Counterfactuals, and the EPR-Bell Argument

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26916v2
• Date: Sat, 02 May 2026 09:12:00 GMT
• Title: Rethinking Nonlocality: Locality, Counterfactuals, and the EPR-Bell Argument
• Abstract summary: The claim that violations of Bell inequalities establish the nonlocality of nature is critically reexamined.<n>The analysis highlights the central role of counterfactual reasoning.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The widespread claim that violations of Bell inequalities establish the nonlocality of nature is critically reexamined. It is argued that this conclusion is not logically compelled by either the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument or Bell's theorem. The analysis highlights the central role of counterfactual reasoning--the assumption that outcomes of unperformed measurements possess definite values--in the derivation of Bell inequalities. It is shown that these inequalities follow not from locality alone, but from the conjunction of locality with a global assignment of values across incompatible measurement contexts. Their experimental violation therefore signals the impossibility of such a global assignment, i.e. contextuality, rather than necessarily implying nonlocal causation. This perspective is further illustrated within Nelson's stochastic mechanics, where entanglement is encoded in a joint stochastic process and measurement corresponds to Bayesian conditioning, thereby sharpening the distinction between contextual correlations and nonlocal dynamical influence.

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