Killtech said:
These arguments were made with the picture of classical pointlike particles in mind, for which classical realism may require such a thing. If you however reject the idea of dealing with objects of such nature to begin with, then i very much doubt classical realism can make such a restriction. After all contextuality is still present in simple scenarios, like asking a friend to come over and it would be weird if realism couldn't deal with that in general.
EDIT:
preexisting values require that the measurement does not itself change anything. That's a the main assumption they made at least implicitly.
In the EPR argument, the claim that measurements had pre-existing values was not an assumption, it was the
conclusion of their argument. And I don’t think that the argument implicitly or otherwise assumes classical pointlike particles.
Certainly even classically, measurements don’t necessarily reveal a pre-existing value. The value of a measurement might be some kind of cooperative result of the interaction between the system being measured (the “measuree” to coin a term) and the system doing the measurement (the “measurer”). For example, if you are doing a survey to find out if someone is pro- or anti- gun control, the answer you get from them may depend on how the question is asked. I’m not sure that this is exactly what is meant by “contextuality”, so let me just call it an “emergent value ”, since the value emerges through the interaction between the “measurer” and the “measuree”.
So the question arises: is quantum uncertainty due to measurement results being emergent in this sense?
Einstein et al argued that it can’t be.
Alice and Bob are two experimenters who are far away from each other, performing measurements. Alice performs her measurement and gets a result. On the basis of her result, she knows with 100% certainty what result Bob will get (assuming he told her ahead of time which measurement he would perform).
So Einstein et al reasoned that there can’t be anything “emergent” about Bob’s result. If the result depended on details about Bob and his measurement device and exactly how the measurement was performed, then how can Alice predict with 100% certainty what result Bob will get, since she doesn’t know any of those details? She only knows (1) What measurement Bob will perform (because he told her ahead of time) and (2) what the result of
her measurement was. No other details about Bob’s situation are relevant. Einstein thought that this situation could only be explained by the result being pre-determined. That was the conclusion, not the assumption.
There is nothing about particles or things being pointlike.