19 October 2004
Can any Description
of Reality be Completed?
Tomasz Placek, Jagellion University, Poland
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: The idea behind hidden-variable
models of quantum mechanics is "incomplete description": e.g.,
correlations between space-like separated measurement results are
supposed to vanish in a completed description. Using resources
of Belnap's (Synthese 1992) branching space-times (BST), I analyze
a general notion of completing a description in terms of model extensions.
I investigate then which descriptions of phenomena can be completed,
and for what price.