The Importance of Being Frank

 Frank, I have a hard time knowing what your point is. Do you have
 a hidden-variables model which *does* reproduce the same predictions
 as quantum mechanics? The point of Bell's inequalities is to rule
 out a large class of such models (if not all). (Daryl McCullough)

The approach Frank Wappler is (somewhat cryptically) expressing is 
very old and familiar to people who have thought about EPR experiments
and Bell's inequalities.  It's essentially an application of logical
positivism, i.e., he simply asserts that if something cannot be
directly apprehended by immediate sense perceptions/measurements,
then it doesn't exist.  For example, he rejects the idea of two
separate events (spin measurements) possessing a joint correlation
when they are spacelike-separated, because there is no means of
apprehending such a thing (barring superliminal communication).
It is only when those two measurements are brought together and
compared that the joint correlation comes into existence, but at 
that point "the relevant Bell inequality" is trivially satisfied 
(because all the information is co-local).  This is the basis on 
which Frank says "The condition of no [superliminal] signalling 
is sufficient to ensure that *the relevant* Bell inequality is 
satisfied".  He is just being coy by not highlighting the word 
"relevant".  From a positivist's point of view, the relevant Bell 
inequality is always trivially satisfied.

Of course, none of this refutes Bell's thesis about the limits of
what he called "local realism", because one of the tenets of Bell's
realism is that unobserved facts exist, which is precisely what
positivism denies.  So essentially Frank is telling you something 
you already know, which is that if you give up traditional realism 
it's possible to construct models that are consistent with QM and 
that also satisfy *the relevant* Bell inequality.  He does this by
repeating Bell's analysis from a strictly positivist (and non-realist)
standpoint to derive what he considers to be the relevant bounds.

Needless to say, a committed positivist believes that his view
IS realism.  In general, considerations of Bell's inequalities
always lead us to formulate alternate understandings of what
constitutes effective realism, but for purposes of communication
it would be best for Frank to acknowledge that his realism is
not Bell's, and therefore none of his comments pertain directly
to Bell's thesis (which is an important point to make when the
people you're addressing are enagaged in a discussion of Bell's
thesis).

As is well known, the current practice of physics does not in
general conform to the strictures of logical positivism.  Recall that
Einstein, the physicist most famously associated with positivism,
ultimately rejected it as inadequate for the formulation of meaningful
physical theories.  Moreover, even in the words of today's most fervent 
crypto-positivists one detects the signs of internal tension.  For 
example, after asserting (unobjectionably) that correlations between 
distant events do not exist prior to their evaluation (at which point 
they are no longer "distant"), the crypto-positivist is tempted to 
offer a mapping of observations to prior concepts such as "alignment".
He'll suggest defining "relative orientation" in terms of observational
results, and he hopes by doing this to convince people that he's simply
describing an enlightened view of traditional realism.

Unfortunately the web of this "realism" becomes extremely tangled
if we try to incorporate the "alignments" of both spin 1/2 and
spin 1 particles, etc.  Furthermore, by taking distant measurements
and operating on them in various complex ways PRIOR to bringing the
results together, it becomess necessary to define *everything*,
from galaxy clusters to kitchen sinks, in terms of the simple
observational results of each individual EPR trial.  Thus we quickly
lose sight of anything that can plausibly be called realism.  The
only way positivism (or any other form of solipsism) can succeed
is in pure form, with no pretensions to saving traditional
external independent realism.

Of course, positivistic questions can be heurestically useful in the 
early stages of one's thought (say, junior high school) to be sure 
we've clearly distinguished between primary perceptions and conceptual 
constructs, but they're essentially useless for advancing beyond 
those stages.  That's the standard critique of solipsism in general 
and logical positivism in particular:  formally unobjectionable, 
but utterly barren and sterile.  At some point, if you intend to 
meaningfully engage the world as an external independent reality, 
it's necessary to pass from the inductive (child) to the deductive 
(adult).

There's no trick to spending an entire life asking, with mock child-
like naivete, "How do we know?".  As Poincare observed, it's equally 
convenient to doubt everything or to doubt nothing, because either 
alternative relieves us of the requirement to think and to form 
conclusions.  

As an aside, it's interesting to note the similarities between the 
modes of engagement practiced by crypto-positivists on the internet 
and cult recruiters on university campuses.  In both cases it's 
essential to avoid early identification of the true "sponsor", and 
in both cases a disengenuous Socratic method is employed to introduce 
the naive target to solipsistic doubt ("How would we know?"), with 
the intention of gradually undermining the target's tenuous grasp on 
reality BEFORE actually naming the world view that is to be offerred.
Luckily this approach is effective only when applied to ernest but 
spiritually naive individuals with generally sophmoric views of 
philosophy and science, and there aren't any of those around here.