Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle claims that if there is correlation
between two events and none of them is directly causally influenced by the
other, then there must exist a third event that can, as a common cause, account
for the correlation. The EPR-Bell paradox consists in the problem that we
observe correlations between spatially separated events in the EPR-experiments,
which do not admit common-cause-type explanation; and it must therefore be
inevitably concluded, that, contrary to relativity theory, in the realm of
quantum physics there exists action at a distance, or at least superluminal
causal propagation is possible; that is, either relativity theory or
Reichenbach's common cause principle fails. By means of closer analyses of the
concept of common cause and a more precise reformulation of the EPR
experimental scenario, I will sharpen the conclusion we can draw from the
violation of Bell's inequalities. It will be explicitly shown that the
correla-tions we encounter in the EPR experiment could have common causes; that
is, Reichen-bach's Common Cause Principle does not fail in quantum mechanics.
Moreover, these common causes satisfy the locality conditions usually required.
In the Revised Version of the paper I added a Postscript from which it turns
out that the solution such obtained is, contrary to the original title,
incomplete. It turns out that a new problem arises: some combinations of the
common cause events do statistically cor-relate with the measurement
operations.