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Commutativity, Comeasurability, and Contextuality in the Kochen-Specker Arguments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Gábor Hofer-Szabó
Gábor Hofer-Szabó*
Affiliation:
To contact the author, please write to: Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest; e-mail: szabo.gabor@btk.mta.hu.
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Abstract

I will argue that Kochen-Specker arguments do not provide an algebraic proof for quantum contextuality since, for the argument to be effective, (1) operators must be uniquely associated with measurements and (2) commuting operators must represent simultaneous measurements. However, in all Kochen-Specker arguments discussed in the literature either 1 or 2 is not met. Arguments meeting 1 contain commuting operators that do not represent simultaneous measurements and hence fail to physically justify the functional composition principle. Arguments meeting 2 associate some operators with more than one measurement and hence need to invoke an extra assumption different from noncontextuality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 483 - 510
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

This work has been supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (K-115593 and K-134275) and a Senior Research Scholarship of the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg. I wish to thank the members of the Budapest Research Group on the Philosophical Foundations of Science, especially Márton Gömöri and Balázs Gyenis for valuable discussions and Karim Thebault for reading the final version of the article.

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