HPS student, Sebastián Murgueitio Ramirez, will be presenting his paper titled "What Separability is...and is Not" at the Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Physics Graduate Conference held at Western University. For more detailed information about this conference, please follow this link: http://www.logicmathphysics.uwo.ca/. An abstract for his paper is provided below:
In this paper, I will argue that one of the most common interpretations of Einstein's Principle of Separability (henceforth "separability") is mistaken. In particular, I will show that the widespread interpretation according to which separability is (or entails) some sort of supervenience principle according to which states of subsystems determine the states of composite systems is inadequate. In order to properly contextualize the discussion, I start the paper by offering a detailed review of the different ways in which the principle has been defined by physicists and philosophers in the last 60 years. Here, I show that the supervenience interpretation of separability that emerged after the 90s is still widely endorsed. Then, I will argue that Einstein's incompleteness argument does not require the truth of such a supervenience thesis, and, furthermore, that identifying separability with such a supervenience thesis (or assuming that it entails one) makes his argument unsound.