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

TL;DR

This paper critically reexamines the common interpretation that Bell inequality violations prove nonlocality, emphasizing the role of contextuality and challenging the assumption that such violations directly imply nonlocal causation.

Contribution

It argues that Bell inequalities stem from locality combined with a global value assignment, and their violation indicates contextuality, not necessarily nonlocality, supported by analysis within Nelson's stochastic mechanics.

Findings

Bell inequalities follow from locality and a global value assignment.

Violations indicate contextuality, not necessarily nonlocal causation.

Stochastic mechanics illustrates the distinction between contextuality and nonlocal influence.

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.