Studies in History and Philosophy of I try to define for general physical theories what we mean by ‘holism’. For this purpose I

ARTICLE IN PRESS$This paper is based on talks given at the ‘International Workshop on Holism in the Philosophy of Physics ’ held at Bonn on 4–5 July 2003 and at the ‘12th UK Conference on the Foundations of Physics’1355-2198/ $-doi:10.1016/j held at Leeds E-mail adpropose an epistemological criterion to decide whether or not a physical theory is holistic, namely: a physical theory is holistic if and only if it is impossible in principle to infer the global properties, as assigned in the theory, by local resources available to an agent. I propose that these resources include at least all local operations and classical communication. This approach is contrasted with the well-known approaches to holism in terms of supervenience. The criterion for holism proposed here involves a shift in emphasis from ontology to epistemology. I apply this epistemological criterion to classical physics and Bohmian mechanics as represented on a phase and configuration space respectively, and for quantum mechanics (in the orthodox interpretation) using the formalism of general quantum operations as completely positive trace non-increasing maps. Furthermore, I provide an interesting example from which one can conclude that quantum mechanics is holistic in the above mentioned sense, although, perhaps surprisingly, no entanglement is needed.Modern Physics 35 (2004) 693–712 Holism, physical theories and quantu