Reply to Gillis's "On the Analysis of Bell's 1964 Paper by Wiseman, Cavalcanti, and Rieffel"

TL;DR

This paper responds to Gillis' critique of earlier work on Bell's theorem, clarifying misunderstandings and emphasizing the importance of an unbiased approach in quantum foundations debates.

Contribution

It clarifies the authors' position on Bell's formalizations and addresses philosophical biases in the critique, promoting clearer communication in quantum foundations.

Findings

Gillis' critique relies heavily on philosophical inclinations.

Bell's formalizations of locality are reaffirmed.

Misstatements by Gillis regarding the authors' views are corrected.

Abstract

We address Gillis' recent criticism [arXiv:1506.05795] of a series of papers (by different combinations of the present authors) on formulations of Bell's theorem. Those papers intended to address an unfortunate gap of communication between two broad camps in the quantum foundations community that we identify as "operationalists" and "realists". Here, we once again urge the readers to approach the question from an unbiased standpoint, and explain that Gillis' criticism draws too heavily on the philosophical inclinations of one side of that debate -- the realist camp. As part of that explanation we discuss intuition versus proof, look again at Bell's formalizations of locality, and correct misstatements by Gillis of our views, and those of Bell and Einstein.