Abstract

In recent years, something of a consensus has emerged amongst philosophers of physics to the effect that the violation of Bell's inequalities forces us to draw strong metaphysical conclusions about the structure of the physical world. The arguments which support this position are taken to have weak and general premises, mostly amounting to descriptions of relatively bare experimental data. These premises putatively point to formal constraints on the possible models of the phenomena; from there, we are led to a metaphysical outcome. In particular, it is widely believed that any adequate model of the phenomena will violate a probabilistic constraint known as "completeness"; what is more, the idea that this formal result signals holism in the world is gaining momentum. I begin by showing that this argument has the particular appeal that, if successful, it must command the allegiance of both the scientific realist and the constructive empiricist. Unfortunately, on close examination the conclusion about formal matters is not well-supported by the non-partisan arguments for it. ;Despite this, many would claim that we can arrive at the same formal conclusion by appealing to the internal structure of quantum mechanics. Such a manoeuvre can only have force for the realist, and so if we adopt it we have lost the hope of laying aside epistemological disagreements in the performance of metaphysics. Nonetheless, I go on to examine the interpretational claim that failures of completeness are indicative of physical holism. If this claim is correct, then there should be an argument for completeness which takes the absence of holism as a premise. Constructing such an argument should help us to discover exactly what sort of holism is involved, if any. I locate such an argument, and conclude that invoking holism in quite a central sense is indeed one way of understanding the failure of Bell inequalities. I close by detailing the considerable difficulties we might have in reconciling ourselves to such an understanding. These difficulties, I argue, are ones which must beset any attempt to understand the failure of the Bell inequalities by invoking holism