English

Contextuality, Fine-Tuning, and Teleological Explanation

Quantum Physics 2021-11-24 v2

Abstract

I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. Finally I discuss several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and consider how their results should be interpreted by scientific realists. In the course of this discussion I obtain several new mathematical results - I demonstrate that preparation contextuality is a form of fine-tuning, I show that measurement contextuality can be explained by appeal to a global constraint forbidding closed causal loops, and I demonstrate how negative probabilities can arise from a classical ontological model together with an epistemic restriction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.15898,
  title  = {Contextuality, Fine-Tuning, and Teleological Explanation},
  author = {Emily Adlam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.15898},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Forthcoming in Foundations of Physics

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:18:08.361Z