Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments: the structure of the probability space. I

Incompatibility of measurements, central to quantum mechanics, is captured in the formalism of empirical logic, which is based on a generalization of the notion of a sample space in Kolmogoroff's axiomatic theory of probability. In composite empirical systems of the kind considered in the Einstein-Podolsky-RosenGedankenexperiment, incompatibility gives rise to the notion of influence, which is closely related to stochastic independence.These concepts are used to study the methodological structure of a large class of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type experiments, linking a series of much debated issues such as scientific Realism, ontological and epistemic uncertainty, determinism, locality, separability, factorizability, completeness, conservation, correlation, Bell-Clauser-Horne inequalities, and hidden-variables models to an axiomatic probability theory.