Grower (2000) - Cassirer, Schick and Structural Realism

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8(1) 2000: 71 106
ARTICLE CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE EXACT SCIENCES IN THE BACKGROUND TO EARLY LOGICAL EMPIRICISM
Barry Gower
1 One of the conspicuous features of current philosophy of science is the bewildering variety of scienti c realisms and anti-realisms confronting us.1 This is not so very surprising if we bear in mind that the seeds of the many relevant issues were planted at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time of unprecedented innovatory research in the mathematical and physical sciences, by scientists such as Mach, Planck, Poincar and Duhem,2 and that there has been ample opportunity for the yield of those seeds to be gathered and sifted. We have, though, done little which would help us to understand how those seeds germinated, grew and prospered. 3 In this paper I wish to examine just one of those seeds. It has lately assumed an importance because of its relevance to ways in which we might restrict the ambitious scope of scienti c realism without curtailing that scope in an anti-realist manner. There is, I shall argue, a broader context than is usually recognized for versions of restricted realism and by drawing attention to it I intend to try to bring into focus some neglected discussions which played a part in the origins
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There are useful collections of in uential papers on scienti c realism and anti-realism in J. Leplin (ed.) Scienti c Realism (Berkeley, California University Press, 1984) and in J. Worrall (ed.) The Ontology of Science (Aldershot, Dartmouth, 1994). Duhem considered himself to be, primarily, a physicist. He made signi cant contributions to thermodynamics, particularly its abstract axiomatic foundations: see P. Duhem, Trait dnergtique ou de thermodynamique gnrale, 2 vols (Paris, GauthierVillars, 1911). For more information on Duhems physics, see S. Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). But see A. Fine, Einsteins realism, in J. T. Cushing, C. F. Delaney, and G. M. Gutting (eds) Science and Reality: Recent Work in the Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 10633; reprinted in A. Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and Quantum Theory, second edition (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1996); D. Howard, Realism and conventionalism in Einsteins philosophy of science: the EinsteinSchlick correspondence, Philosophia Naturalis 21 (1984): pp. 61629; D. Howard, Was Einstein really a realist?, Perspectives on Science 1 (1993): pp. 204 51.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN 0960-8788 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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of logical empiricism and which are capable, I believe, of illuminating those origins as well as some of our present preoccupations. More particularly, by drawing attention to the emergence of a version of realism we now call structural realism, I shall try to support the claim that Schlicks realism and empiricism contain signi cant Kantian elements. 4 But before turning to the historical issues, let me set out some of the chief features of the realism that forms the background to this exploration of those issues. The versions of restricted realism that I shall be concerned with count as realisms because they claim that scienti c theories are more than instrumental calculating devices or co-ordinating systems, and that they aim at truth rather than mere empirical adequacy. 5 Their defence needs, therefore, to identify the extra element which would contribute to the achievement of that aim, as well as to nd ways of resisting the reasons which have led others to anti-realist positions. But at least part of their strength comes from the recognition by realisms advocates of the vulnerability of the support commonly offered for realism. In particular, the claim that theories in a mature science must be true, or at least approximately true, for otherwise their success would be miraculous, overlooks the fact that in the history of science successful theories have regularly turned out to be false. 6 That
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The point is not, of course, new; Schlicks Kantianism is clearly displayed in J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition From Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, edited by Linda Wessells (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 9. I have discussed some aspects of Schlicks Kantianism in my Realism and empiricism in Schlicks philosophy, in D. Bell and W. Vossenkuhl (eds), Science and Subjectivity: The Vienna Circle and Twentieth Century Philosophy, (Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1992), pp. 20224. Scienti c instrumentalism is the view that scienti c theories are just calculating devices making no truth claims about unobservable entities, properties and processes; their purpose is only that of enabling us to co-ordinate, classify and predict observable and experimental data as conveniently and correctly as possible. A more moderate kind of scienti c antirealism claims that although theories make claims about unobservables which aim at truth, we can never know or be justi ed in believing that any such claim is true; we can, though, be justi ed in believing that a theorys claims about observable things, properties and processes are correct, in which case the theory is said to save the phenomena or be empirically adequate. For a vigorous defence of the claim that empirical adequacy is suf cient, see B. van Fraassen, The Scienti c Image, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980). A modern version of the argument from the success of mature scienti c theories to their truth is presented in R. Boyd, The current status of scienti c realism, Erkenntnis 19 (1983): 4590. Poincar gave a clear statement of the dif culty for scienti c realism presented by the past failures of theories at the beginning chapter 10 of his Science and Hypothesis, translated by W. J. Greenstreet (New York, Dover Publications, 1952), originally published as La science et lhypothse. (Paris, Flammarion, 1902): The ephemeral nature of scienti c theories takes by surprise the man of the world. Their brief period of prosperity ended, he sees them abandoned one after another; he sees ruins piled upon ruins; he predicts that the theories in fashion to-day will in a short time succumb in their turn, and he concludes that they are absolutely in vain. This is what he calls the bankruptcy of science. (p. 160) For an in uential modern statement of this argument, commonly known as the pessimistic meta-induction, see L. Laudan, A confutation of convergent realism, Philosophy of Science 48 (1981): pp. 19 48.
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history is, indeed, punctuated by episodes in which earlier beliefs, including the most fundamental of beliefs about the kind of world we live in, are set aside in favour of new beliefs, sometimes of a revolutionary character. Typically, the failure of past scienti c theories derives from the fact that their central explanatory concepts are empty: there are no crystalline spheres; there is no such thing as phlogiston, or caloric; there is no aether; there are no electric or magnetic uids, etc. The implications are that a realist would be unable to explain the past successes of the theories employing such concepts, and that the success of currently accepted theories should not be taken as indicative that their central explanatory concepts are referential, or even approximately referential. But, according to restricted realism, these implications are false; it is not only the instrumental ef cacy or the empirical adequacy of the discarded non-referential beliefs that can survive in some form, for there is a part of, or an aspect of, what is expressed in those beliefs that is carried over into the new beliefs. Philip Kitcher has pointed out that the success of a theory, like its con rmation, is selectively distributed. So if a theory is successful on account of the truth of its predictions then only those parts of the theory which are required to generate those predictions can count as contributing to that success, and only those parts of the theory can therefore be accorded a realist interpretation. No sensible realist, he says, should ever want to assert that the idle parts of an individual practice, past or present, are justi ed by the success of the whole. Accordingly, it is not enough to conceive a theory as a set of statements and distribute the success of the whole uniformly over the parts. One has to see how the statements are used.7 In the case of structural scienti c realism,8 the central idea is that scienti c theories do indeed provide information unavailable to us in observation and experimentation, but that information is about the form or structure, rather than the nature or content, of what is unobservable. Often, it is claimed, when one theory is replaced by another, it is information
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P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993) pp. 1423. Cf. C. Hempel, Aspects of Scienti c Explanation (New York, Free Press, 1965) ch.1; C. Glymour, Theory and Evidence (Princeton, NJ., Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 3048. Modern interest in structural realism dates from G. Maxwell, Structural realism and the meaning of theoretical terms, in M. Radner and S. Winokur (eds), Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Psychology, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.4, (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1970), pp. 18192. Maxwell used the device of Ramsey sentences to develop a version of structural scienti c realism. See also G. Maxwell, Theories, perception and structural realism, in R. Colodny (ed.), The Nature and Function of Scienti c Theories, (Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh University Press, 1970), pp. 334. Russells advocacy of structural realism is discussed in W. Demopoulos and M. Friedman, Critical notice: Bertrand Russells The Analysis of Matter: its historical context and contemporary interest, Philosophy of Science 52 (1985): 621 39, and in W. Demopoulos and M. Friedman, The concept of structure in The Analysis of Matter, in C. Wade Savage and C. A. Anderson (eds) Rereading Russell: Essays on Bertrand Russells Metaphysics and Epistemology, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.12, (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1989), pp. 183 99.
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about the essential nature of what is unobservable that is replaced, rather than information about the structure of the unobservable. Consequently, according to the structural scienti c realist, we can and should avoid the inference from the failure of scienti c theories in the past to an anti-realist conclusion. We should restrict our scienti c realism to the claim that knowledge of what is theoretical in science is con ned to its structural characteristics; we have no knowledge of its intrinsic nature. This distinction needs clari cation if we are to use it to explain structural realism. What is the basis of the difference between essential and structural properties of, say, a theoretical entity? And how far is that difference a re ection of interests and concerns that may change? No current discussions address these questions in a direct and explicit manner. 9 However, the idea of structural realism, broadly construed, was considered and adopted by a number of philosophers in the early decades of this century. We can nd in Poincar and in Duhem, in Cassirer, in Schlick and in Carnap, and in Russell, indications that this idea and the questions it raises were examined in a careful and illuminating manner. The general context for that examination suggested that the ontological import of a theory, whether scienti c or not, derives from its structure alone. 10 Mathematics comes within the scope of this broad context, and it
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There is, though, an analysis of some of the ambiguities in the idea of structuralism as applied to mathematics in C. S. Chihara, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990) ch. 7, and in M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London, Duckworth, 1991) pp. 295 7. The implications of those ambiguities for structural scienti c realism await examination. Some will be apparent because of the close connections between mathematics and mathematical physics, and it is no accident that the examples used to explain and illustrate structural scienti c realism are provided by mathematical physics. But it is not obvious that all theories in physics lend themselves to a distinction between content and structure. How could theories of atomic structure remain theories about the structure of atoms if they were not, in fact, about atoms? And if we look to theories other than those of physics, the prospects look even less promising. How could we make a distinction between the content and the structure of Harveys theory of the circulation of the blood or of Darwins theory of natural selection? There are, of course, some issues here which connect with the role of models in science. Bertrand Russell, in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1919) wrote: We know much more (to use, for a moment, an old-fashioned pair of terms) about the form of nature than about the matter. Accordingly, what we really know when we enunciate a law of nature is only that there is probably some interpretation of our terms which will make the law approximately true (p. 55). And, a few pages later, what matters in mathematics, and to a very great extent in physical science, is not the intrinsic nature of our terms, but the logical nature of their interrelations (p. 59). These claims were not properly developed until Russell came to write his Analysis of Matter (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1927). Cf. M. Hallett, Putnam and the Skolem Paradox, in Peter Clark and Bob Hale (eds) Reading Putnam (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994), p. 89: The core of [Russells] attitude consists precisely in a shift away from the view that mathematical theories are concerned essentially with the description of an independent reality, and towards the view that they are at root concerned, not with speci cations in Poincars sense, but rather with tractable axiom systems.
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is there that we nd some of the most detailed and sustained attempts to elucidate a distinction between structure and content. Indeed the character of structural realism, in its widest sense, can be said to have emerged from work in the analytic foundations of mathematics by Dedekind and others at the end of the nineteenth century. 11 Any collection of objects can form a structure, and when they do so they constitute the domain of the structure and will stand in de nite relations to each other. So far as the structure is concerned, any object can be replaced by another, provided only that its relationships are preserved. It is, as it were, the function of an object within a structure, rather than what is outside that structure, that matters. Given this, our knowledge of the objects within the domain of the structure is con ned to what we can learn from the ways those objects are related to each other. If the objects have characteristics over and above these features then they are unknown to us and they play no part in the theory. 12 In a scienti c theory, the theoretical entities invoked form a pattern or structure. The entities, that is to say, are related to each other in ways that are speci ed by the mathematical equations of the theory. No particular physical system need be determined by a scienti c theory, so understood, and it does not, therefore, provide information about any physical system in which the structure is realized. But the theory can nevertheless be used to provide testable predictions, for we can use experiment to realize a particular system corresponding to the data available and
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See C. Parsons, A structuralist view of mathematical objects, in W. D. Hart (ed.) The Philosophy of Mathematics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 275 81, and S. Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) pp. 1706. For an account of how this idea applies in the case of mathematics see M. D. Resnik, Mathematics as a science of patterns: ontology and reference, Nos 15 (1981): 52950; C. Parsons, A structuralist view of mathematical objects, in W. D. Hart (ed.), The Philosophy of Mathematics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996); S. Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997). In M. D. Resnik, Mathematics as a Science of Patterns (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997) p. 201, the idea is expressed thus:
1
in mathematics the primary subject-matter is not the individual mathematical objects but rather the structures in which they are arranged. The objects of mathematics, that is, the entities which our mathematical constants and quanti ers denote, are themselves atoms, structureless points, or positions in structures. And as such they have no identity or distinguishing features outside a structure.
G. Hellman in his Modal-structural mathematics, in A. D. Irvine (ed.), Physicalism in Mathematics (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990) p. 309, explains that:
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Broadly speaking, structuralism is the view that mathematical theories typically investigate relations holding among items of structures of a given type in abstraction from the identity of those individual items. As it stands, of course, this is vague: for what counts as a structure? How are structures characterized? What are the commitments of structuralism concerning the intelligibility of higher-order concepts and ontology (e.g. do structures have to be recognized as actually existing, etc.)?
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predict the behaviour of that system using the mathematical equations expressing the structure of the theory. If subsequent experimental evidence shows that the predictions are correct, then we can conclude with an appropriate degree of con dence that the theory is correct in what it says about form or structure. 13 Structural realism invites us, that is, to distinguish between what a scienti c theory is, implicitly or explicitly, about, and what it says concerning what it is about. If we regard mathematical equations as expressing structural relationships between phenomena, however they may be realized, then according to this view scienti c theories, or at least those expressed in mathematical terms, provide us with evidence-transcending information about those structural relationships, and not about the way they are realized. Heinrich Hertz expressed the core of this realism with his well-known declaration: To this question, What is Maxwells theory? I cannot give any clearer or briefer answer than the following: Maxwells theory is the system of Maxwells equations .14 Often, the conclusions scientists reach about structural relationships do not change over a period of time even though there may be many changes of view about what these relationships relate. In those circumstances, we would be justied in believing that the conclusions provide information about the structure or form of reality, though we would not be justi ed in believing that they inform us about the nature or content of the way in which the structure is realized. More than a century ago, in 1888, Richard Dedekind presented a famous account of natural numbers which used, he claimed, only logical notions. What he did was to de ne a certain simply in nite system, and to postulate natural numbers as free creations of the human mind realized in the system.15 In seeking an account of arithmetic which would make it continuous with logic and thereby independent of notions or intuitions of space or time, he was sharing common ground with Frege and rejecting the constructivist epistemology of Kants Transcendental Aesthetic. But whereas Frege regarded numbers as having a mind-independent nature or essence which enables us to say what it is about them that enables them to satisfy the system he speci es, Dedekinds view that they are free creations
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According to a recent account of the semantic conception of scienti c theories in F. Suppe, The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scienti c Realism (Urbana, Illinois University Press, 1989) p. 84: we analyse theories as relational systems consisting of a domain containing all (logically) possible states of all (logically) possible physical systems for the theory together with various attributes de ned over that domain. H. Hertz, Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity Through Space, translated by D. E. Jones (New York, Dover Publications, 1962), p. 21. First published in 1892. R. Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, translated by W. W. Beman, revised by W. B. Ewald, in W. B. Ewald (ed.), From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, vol.2 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996) 73. Originally published in 1888.
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implies a rejection of that platonistic view as well as a rejection of a constructivist picture of arithmetic incorporating constraints deriving from human capacities to imagine or to construct. To this extent, Dedekind does not tell us what natural numbers are. He invites, indeed, a structuralist interpretation of his account when he says:
If in the consideration of a simply in nite system N ordered by a mapping f we entirely neglect the special character of the elements, simply retaining their distinguishability and taking into account only the relations to one another in which they are placed by the mapping f , then these elements are called natural numbers or ordinal numbers or simply numbers.16
Certainly Bertrand Russell appears to interpret Dedekinds theory as an expression of structuralism when he complains that:
it is impossible that the ordinals should be, as Dedekind suggests, nothing but the terms of such relations as constitute a progression. If they are anything at all, they must be intrinsically something; they must differ from other entities as points from instants, or colours from sounds. 17
But this complaint ignores Dedekinds implicit acknowledgement that the elements of his system, the natural numbers, do have a special character which must derive from numbers being free creations. Numbers are, it seems, to be understood as particular mental things, and the question that this understanding raises is how, then, can we explain the objectivity of arithmetic. Although Dedekind does not address this question explicitly, he
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Dedekind, op.cit. (note 15) p. 809. According to Stein, Dedekind was ontologically indifferent about natural numbers because he thought that it does not matter what numbers are; what matters is that they constitute a simply in nite system (H. Stein, Logos, logic, and Logistik: some philosophical remarks on the nineteenth century transformation of mathematics, in W. Aspray and P. Kitcher (eds), History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 11 (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1988) p. 247). This is to attribute to Dedekind what has been called an eliminative version of structuralism, according to which statements apparently about a kind of mathematical object, such as numbers, are to be understood as general statements about speci ed structures enabling us to eliminate reference to mathematical objects of the kind in question (see C. Parsons, A structuralist view of mathematical objects, in W. D. Hart (ed.) The Philosophy of Mathematics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 277). Steins view is challenged by McCarty on the grounds that it fails to take account of Dedekinds repeated and consistently held claim that numbers are free creations of the human mind (C. McCarty, The mysteries of Richard Dedekind, in J. Hintikka (ed.), From Dedekind to Gdel (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995) pp. 68 70). For discussion of the issue, see S. Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) pp. 172 6. B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, second edition (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1937) p. 249. The rst edition was published in 1903.
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seems to have believed that, in Kantian terms, it is our reason that creates numbers, and that the logical constraints on reason imposed by the need for numbers to satisfy his simply in nite system ensure that what one person creates will coincide in its arithmetical properties with what another person constructs. 18 Numbers are mental particulars but nevertheless our knowledge of numerical truths is objective because numbers are free creations of human reason and can have no properties other than the structural or relational properties determined by their role in Dedekinds system. There may well be fundamental disagreements about the subject matter or content of arithmetic even though this does not result in disputes about arithmetical truths. Thus, Frege observed that, in a quite literal sense, mathematicians do not know what they are talking about. For some, arithmetical claims are about abstract particulars called numbers; for others, such claims are about sets; for still others they are about mental entities; for yet others they are about marks on paper or vocal sounds:
This resembles what it would be like if botanists were not agreed about what they wished to understand by a plant, so that for one botanist a plant was, say, an organically developing structure, for another a human artefact, and for a third something that was not perceptible by the senses at all.19
We do not need to decide whether Dedekind was or was not a mathematical structuralist. It is sufficient to notice that some elements of arguments and claims of structuralists can be found in his writings, and to notice the context for those arguments and claims. Nor do we need to explore the relationship between Dedekinds account of natural numbers and Hilberts treatment of geometry, though it is plain that both rejected the Kantian epistemology. For Hilbert in his Grundlagen der Geometrie the geometrical concepts of point and line are implicitly defined as whatever satisfy the axioms of geometry. Intuitive ideas of what are points and lines can be set aside as psychological irrelevancies. It must always be possible, Hilbert reportedly said, to replace [in geometric statements] the words points, lines, planes, by tables, chairs, mugs. As Frege cor-
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See C. McCarty, The mysteries of Richard Dedekind, in J. Hintikka (ed.) From Dedekind to Gdel (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995) pp. 69, 82 3. G. Frege, Logic in mathematics, in G. Frege, Posthumous Writings, translated by P. Long and R. White (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 215. For discussion of Freges objections to Dedekinds structuralist account of numbers, see M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (London, Duckworth, 1991) ch.5, and W. W. Tait, Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind: on the concept of number, in W. W. Tait (ed.) Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein: Essays in Honor of Leonard Linsky (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, Open Court, 1997) pp. 213 48. See also H. Poincar, Science and Method, translated by Francis Maitland (London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914) p. 155: The de nitions of number are very numerous and of great variety.
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rectly observed of Hilberts approach: you want to detach geometry entirely from spatial intuitions.20 Hilberts axiomatization of geometry does not result in statements which describe a subject matter revealed by intuition, but in a relational structure which fixes and exhausts the meaning of the language in which the structure is described. 21 That is to say, meanings can be given, in the form of implicit definitions, by the relationships themselves. The traditional view was that we need to know what numbers are, or what geometrical distance is, or what atoms are, (or what the words seven, distance or atom mean) before we can decide what statements about numbers, distance, or atoms are true. 22 This view
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D. Hilbert, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 3Bd. (Berlin, Julius Springer Verlag, 1935) p. 403; cf. J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, edited by L. Wessells (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 135, and S. Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) p. 157. G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, translated by Hans Kaal (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1980) p. 43. See also M. Hallett, Physicalism, reductionism and Hilbert in A. D. Irvine (ed.) Physicalism in Mathematics (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990) p. 196: According to Frege, axioms should be self-evident truths. Thus, it should be clear what they are about and that they are true of this. In a letter to Frege, Hilbert says:
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I do not want to assume anything as known in advance; I regard my explanation in sect.1 [of Grundlagen der Geometrie] as the definition of the concepts point, line, plane . . . If one is looking for other definitions of a point, e.g. through paraphrase in terms of extensionless, etc., then I must indeed oppose such attempts in the most decisive way; one is looking for something one can never find because there is nothing there; and everything gets lost and becomes vague and tangled and degenerates into a game of hide-and-seek. 1 (G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, translated by Hans Kaal (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1980) p. 39)
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See, for example, Paul Bernays article Hilbert, David in P. Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967) vol. 3, pp. 496 504. Frege, in a letter to Hilbert, expressed this traditional view as follows: Thus, axioms and theorems can never try to lay down the meaning [Bedeutung] of a sign or word that occurs in them, but it must be already laid down (G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, translated by Hans Kaal (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1980) p. 36). It is, indeed, because meanings are predetermined that axioms can be self-evidently true. Hilbert, in his contribution to the correspondence, expressed his opposition to this traditional view in this way: You say that my concepts, e.g. point, between, are not unequivocally xed . . . But it is surely obvious that every theory is only a scaffolding or schema of concepts together with their necessary relations to one another, and that the basic elements can be thought of in any way one likes. . . In other words: any theory can always be applied to in nitely many systems of basic elements. . . All the statements of the theory of electricity are of course also valid for any other system of things which is substituted for the concepts magnetism, electricity . . . provided only that the requisite axioms are satis ed. But the circumstances I mentioned can never be a defect in a theory, and it is in any case unavoidable. (G. Frege, Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, translated by Hans Kaal (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1980) p. 41)
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was challenged at the end of the nineteenth century: our decisions about what statements are true determine, or more usually underdetermine, what numbers, etc. are. We have, since then, become familiar with the idea that the formalism of a theory can be given alternative semantic interpretations, and that sometimes the intended interpretation can be modeled by an alternative which makes the claims of the theory true. Mathematical structures can qualify as mathematical models, and the claim of structural realism is that when they do the realists demand for evidence-transcending information can be satisfied. 23 2 The view we know as structural scienti c realism was explicitly and clearly expressed by Poincar.24 He claimed that the reality revealed by science concerns the relations between objects, not the objects themselves:
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The structuralism of Dedekind and Hilbert might be thought to raise familiar issues about the models that exemplify a structure, and therefore about the interpretation of the statements specifying the structure. Do we have any assurance that nothing crucial turns on the choice of a model, and that the interpretation indicated by the choice of a model is intended? In Dedekinds case the free creations that are the natural numbers are abstractions which can be realized, or made concrete, in different models; but these models, he claimed, are isomorphic and therefore equivalent from the point of view of the system they exemplify. But the LwenheimSkolem theorem claims that non-standard models of a structure with an in nite model cannot be ruled out. So there are, possibly, non-standard models and unintended interpretations of Dedekinds simply in nite system. But although this purely formal result might show that realism about the system in so far as it is displayed in a model, or in a set of isomorphic models, is mistaken, it does not show that realism about the structural relations of the system is also mistaken. In Hilberts case, we do not need to, and should not, x the reference of the terms used to specify the structure of Euclidean geometry. So the prospect of non-standard models and unintended interpretations can be set aside as irrelevant. It is the form or structure of Euclidean geometry which matters to Hilbert, and it is this form or structure which is xed and real. The content of Euclidean geometry what it is about is not xed and realists can envisage non-standard interpretations or content with equanimity. H. Poincar, Science and Hypothesis, translated by W. J. Greenstreet (New York, Dover Publications, 1952) p. 20:
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Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects; to them it is a matter of indifference if these objects are replaced by others, provided that the relations do not change. Matter does not engage their attention, they are interested in form alone.
For modern discussion of Poincars views, see J. Worrall, Structural realism: the best of both worlds?, in D. Papineau (ed.) The Philosophy of Science (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 13965; J. Worrall, How to remain (reasonably) optimistic: scienti c realism and the luminiferous ether , in D. Hull, M. Forbes and R. M. Burian (eds) PSA 1994, vol.1, (East Lancing, Michigan, Philosophy of Science Association, 1994), pp. 334 42; S. Psillos, Is structural realism the best of both worlds? Dialectica 49 (1995): 15 46; E. Zahar, Poincars structural realism and his logic of discovery, in J. L. Greffe, G. Heinzmann and K. Lorenz (eds) Henri Poincar: Science and Philosophy, International Congress Nancy, France, 1994 (Paris and Berlin, A. Blanchard and Akademie Verlag, 1996) pp. 4568.
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real objects . . . Nature will hide forever from our eyes, [and] the true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain, and the sole condition is that the same relations shall exist between these objects as between the images we are forced to put in their place.25
In the light of the remarkable systematic success of theories in the mathematical sciences, we cannot accept an anti-realist view of them. They cannot, Poincar claimed, be simple practical recipes for predictions, for that would oblige us to attribute their success to chance. But nor can we accept a straightforward realist view of these theories, for although many of them are successful over a period of time, the way in which they change makes it implausible to suppose that they provide ever closer approxi mations to the whole truth. The history of science, he said, shows how ephemeral are theories in the physical science. But still, he continued, they do not entirely perish, and of each of them some traces still remain. The task is to discover the nature of these traces because in them and in them alone is the true reality.26 And Poincars conclusion was that the mathematical equations of physical science contain the traces in question, for they express relations, and if the equations remain true, it is because the relations preserve their reality. What matters, he says, is that theories succeed in capturing the true relations between . . . real objects,27
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26
H. Poincar, op.cit. (note 24) p. 161. The same point is made in the Authors Preface to Science and Hypothesis, p.xxiv: the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable. H. Poincar, op.cit. (note 24) p.xxvi. Cf. Poincars remarks in his The Value of Science, translated by George B. Halsted, in H. Poincar, The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method (Lancaster. Pa., The Science Press, 1913) p. 351: science has already lived long enough for us to be able to nd out by asking its history whether the edi ces it builds stand the test of time, or whether they are only ephemeral constructions. Now what do we see? At rst blush it seems to us that the theories last only a day and that ruins upon ruins accumulate. To-day the theories are born, tomorrow they are the fashion, the day after to-morrow they are classic, the fourth day they are superannuated, and the fth they are forgotten. But if we look more closely, we see that what thus succumb are the theories properly so-called, those that pretend to teach us what things are. But there is in them something which usually survives. If one of them taught us a true relation, this relation is de nitively acquired, and it will be found again under a new disguise in the other theories which will successively come to reign in place of the old. And he concludes, p. 352: the sole objective reality consists in the relations of things . . . Doubtless these relations . . . could not be conceived outside of a mind which conceives them. But they are nevertheless objective because they are, will become, or will remain, common to all thinking beings. Poincar, op.cit. (note 24) p. 161.
27
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despite the fact that the real objects in question are inaccessible to us. In thought, we use images to designate these inaccessible real objects, and we sometimes find it convenient to replace one image by another. But if, as sometimes happens, this replacement has no effect on our claims about the relations between the real objects designated by our images then despite the replacement our understanding of reality will not have changed. Therefore, as Poincar argued in a preface he wrote to his text on theoretical optics, Mathematical theories do not have as their object to reveal to us the true nature of things; that would be an unreasonable aspiration.28 Looked at from our vantage point at the end of the twentieth century, and in the light of our preoccupations, it does indeed look as though Poincar was trying to find a compromise between the realism that invites us when we consider the so-called no miracles argument, and the antirealism that is the conclusion of the so-called pessimistic meta-induction. Put another way, structural scientific realism enables us to have the best of both worlds. That may be so, but we must be careful not to misrepresent Poincar. He does, it is true, mention in support of his version of restricted realism just those arguments which preoccupy us, but nevertheless his views are inevitably grounded in the nineteenth, not the twentieth, century. Unfortunately, Poincar did not set out his philosophical views in a systematic manner so that we can see how they are so grounded, and it is not at all easy to reconstruct them with confidence. However, it is clear that his well-known geometric conventionalism was in part a response to complaints, following the development of non-Euclidean geometries, about Kants pure intuition. Geometrical axioms are neither analytic nor synthetic, and they are not truths which are known either a priori or empirically. They are, rather, definitions in disguise which we may choose to use or not. Kants view was that we know, by pure intuition, what geometrical primitives such as points, lines and planes are, and geometrical axioms state a priori truths about these primitive notions; Poincars view is that everything we know about points, lines and planes we know by virtue of our decision to adopt certain axioms as disguised definitions of these notions. In the context of his debate with Russell at the very end of the nineteenth century, it became clear that disguised definitions serve to identify an object in terms of the relation or relations in which it stands to other objects. So, for example, we give a disguised definition of the object C if we define it as the (unique) object lying between objects A and B. Such
28
Quoted in P. Duhem, Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science, translated and edited, with an introduction, by R. Ariew and P. Barker, (Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Co., 1996) p. 19 from the Prface to H. Poincar, Thorie de mathmatique de la lumire.
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a definition defines an object by specifying its role in a system or pattern or structure. But we might think, and Russell did think, that there is another sense of definition according to which we still lack knowledge of an object even when we know the role it has in a structure. We still need a definition of C even though we know it is the unique object lying between A and B. In case the object should be an unanalysable primitive and therefore undefinable in this second sense, it will be known, if known at all, directly through intuition, or acquaintance as Russell was later to say. The idea that motivates this second sense of definition has been called the thesis of semantic atomism: it says that if a sentence S is to convey information . . . , then its grammatical units must have a meaning before they join their partners in S. 29 In Poincars view, the lesson to be learned from the advent of non-Euclidean geometry was that the grammatical units used in statements expressing geometrical axioms do not and cannot have a predetermined meaning, and that we know nothing about geometrical entities independently of the axioms themselves. It follows from the thesis of semantic atomism that we cannot understand the sentences expressing geometrical axioms as conveying information; they do not in particular convey information about geometric entities; they are disguised definitions and as such have a conventional rather than a propositional character. For Poincar, geometric axioms tell us everything we can know about the meanings of primitive geometrical concepts. 30
29
30
J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, edited by L. Wessells (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 131. Zahar claims that one difficulty for structural realism is that no coherent semantics for this approach is as yet available (E. Zahar, Poincars structural realism and his logic of discovery, in J. L. Greffe, G. Heinzmann and K. Lorenz (eds), Henri Poincar: Science and Philosophy, International Congress Nancy, France, 1994 (Paris and Berlin, A. Blanchard and Akademie Verlag, 1996) p. 47). This is because, according to traditional semantics, i.e. semantic atomism, we cannot properly understand any statement if we do not know what that statement is about. In particular, traditional semantics can only give meaning to relational statements by giving meaning to relata, i.e. the terms denoting what is related. For Poincars endorsement of Hilberts approach to geometry as expressed in Grundlagen der Geometrie see his Science and Method, translated by F. Maitland (London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914) p. 147:
1
What strikes us . . . in the new mathematics is its purely formal character: Imagine, says Hilbert, three kinds of things, which we will call points, straight lines, and planes. . . . What these things are, not only we do not know, but we must not seek to know. It is unnecessary, and one who had never seen either a point or a straight line or a plane could do geometry just as well as we can. . . Thus it will be readily understood that, in order to demonstrate a theorem, it is not necessary or even useful to know what it means. We might replace geometry by the reasoning piano imagined by Stanley Jevons. . . It is no more necessary for the mathematician than it is for these machines to know what he is doing.
The quotation from D. Hilbert can be found in his The Foundations of Geometry, translated by E. J. Townsend (Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co., 1902) p. 3. See also M. Hallett,
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If we translate these ideas into the context of mathematical physics we see an additional, and deeper, source for structural realism. We do not know about theoretical entities independently of the theoretical principles concerning them; theoretical terms do not have a meaning prior to that given them by their role in theoretical principles. We might think that we do have such knowledge when we try to picture, with the help of a model, what a theory says. But for Poincar this would be to embrace anthropomorphism: if such a person:
claims that all physics can be explained by the mutual impact of atoms [and] simply means that the same relations obtain between physical phenomena as between the mutual impact of a large number of billiard balls well and good! This is veri able and perhaps true. But he means something more, and we think we understand him because we think we know what an impact is. Why? Simply because we have often watched a game of billiards. Are we to understand that God experiences the same sensations in the contemplation of his work that we do in watching a game of billiards? If it is not our intention to give his assertion
Physicalism, reductionism and Hilbert, in A. D. Irvine (ed.) Physicalism in Mathematics, (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990) pp. 199200:
1
What kind of direct insight could we possibly have into the notion of point or line? The dif culties here are apparent from the highly unclear attempts made by Euclid to explain the basic geometrical terms at the beginning of the Elements. One of the ways in which Hilberts work on geometry was an improvement over the system of Euclid is that it dispenses with such explanations (and in particular with extensive reliance on intuition as a source of direct knowledge of the objects of the science), and the nature of the improvement, if good in this case, is surely quite general. . . . Hilbert claimed, in effect, that we do not need any kind of direct or extra insight into the referents of the basic terms of mathematics in order to be able to understand mathematical theories: the axioms governing the concepts involved contain all the insight we get or need. According to Hilbert, the axioms of geometry or real numbers are hence more like collective implicit de nitions of the terms that gure in them than basic truths in Freges sense. . . . Hilbert clearly intends this notion of de nition in a strong sense, namely that the axiom system completely xes the meaning of the concepts involved.
A further aspect of the general background for what Poincar says concerning structural realism in science is to be found in his discussion of objectivity in science in The Value of Science. There, after drawing attention to the incommunicability (intransmissibility) of the content of sensations and the communicability of relations between sensations, he says: nothing is objective which is not transmissible, and consequently . . . the relations between the sensations can alone have an objective value and science . . . is a system of relations [and] it is in the relations alone that objectivity must be sought. The objective value of science he says, does not lie in the ability of science to teach us the true nature of things, for neither it nor any other kind of enquiry has such an ability; it lies, rather, in the ability of science to teach the true relations of things . . . If any god knew [the nature of things], he could not nd words to express it [and] I ask myself even whether we really understand the question (H. Poincar, The Value of Science, translated by G. B. Halsted, in H. Poincar, The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method (Lancaster. Pa., The Science Press, 1913) pp. 348 50).
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this fantastic meaning, and if we do not wish to give it the more restricted meaning I have already mentioned, which is the sound meaning, then it has no meaning at all.31
The attempts of the physicist to go beyond knowledge of structure as expressed in theoretical statements about relations between physical phenomena, and acquire knowledge of the phenomena themselves is not only unnecessary, but founded on questionable philosophy. Kant had claimed that concepts without intuitions are empty, but in mathematics and the mathematical sciences it was becoming clear how this claim could be challenged. Misgivings about the necessity or indeed legitimacy of the role of intuition in geometry lay behind and motivated Poincars conventionalism; and misgivings about the necessity or legitimacy of pictures or models intended to convey information, albeit by analogy, about the subject matter of theoretical principles in mathematical science led to his structuralist account of those principles. For if the arrival of non-Euclidean geometries had demonstrated the dispensability and indeed the impossibility of knowing what points, lines, planes are independent of geometrical axioms, the development of mathematical physics in the nineteenth century in the hands of French and German analysts had shown that reason, without the aid of imaginative pictures or models, was entirely suf cient to meet reasonable demands for knowledge and understanding. It is of course to Duhem that we look for a sustained critique of English methods, and their dependence on models. But the well-known chapter in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, which sets out the grounds for his hostility to those methods, is preceded by two chapters in which we nd a neglected but clear re-statement of Poincars claim that theories reveal the truth about structural relations in nature rather than the truth about relata. Physical theory, he says, never reveals realities hiding under the sensible appearances; but the more complete it becomes . . . the more we suspect that the relations it establishes among the data of observation correspond to real relations among things. We cannot appeal to observation for a proof that this suspicion is correct, for observation itself cannot prove that the order established among experimental laws re ects an order transcending experience. But nevertheless, a physicist cannot . . . believe
31
H. Poincar, Science and Hypothesis, translated by W. J. Greenstreet (New York, Dover Publications, 1952) pp. 163 4. See also Poincars remarks, in the special preface he wrote to Halsteds translations, on the differences between the characteristic approaches of Latins and Anglo-Saxons. For example: The Anglo-Saxon to depict a phenomenon will rst be engrossed in making a model, and he will make it with common materials, such as our crude, unaided senses show us them. He also makes a hypothesis, he assumes implicitly that nature, in her nest elements, is the same as in the complicated aggregates which alone are within the reach of our senses. He concludes from the body to the atom. (H. Poincar, The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method (Lancaster, Pa., The Science Press 1913) p. 6)
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that a system capable of ordering so simply and so easily a vast number of laws, so disparate at rst encounter, should be a purely arti cial system. That is to say, it is impossible for a physicist to believe that the success of physical theory is a marvelous feat of chance; he or she believes, rather, that the success of a theory is a consequence of its being a natural representation of the real relations among the invisible realities.32 These remarks make it clear that Duhem endorses a central argument for scienti c realism; so he needs to nd a way of reconciling this endorsement with his well-known arguments which appear to support a version of scienti c anti-realism. To this end he distinguishes between what he calls the explanatory role of a theory and the representative role of a theory. To ful ll the former explanatory role a theory must inform us about invisible realities, and in Duhems view, as explained in the rst chapter of his book, this is a task beyond the capacity and scope of any physical theory. To ful ll the latter representative role a theory must inform us about relations, and in Duhems view this is a task successful physical theories can and do perform. Everything good in [a] theory, he says, by virtue of which it . . . [has] the power to anticipate experience, is found in the representative part, whereas whatever is false in [a] theory and contradicted by the facts is found above all in the explanatory part; the physicist has brought error into it, led by his desire to take hold of realities. As a consequence, he says:
When the progress of experimental physics goes counter to a theory and compels it to be modi ed or transformed, the purely representative part enters nearly whole in the new theory, bringing to it the inheritance of all the valuable possessions of the old theory, whereas the explanatory part falls out in order to give way to another explanation. 33
For both Poincar and Duhem, then, a defensible scienti c realism must be structural in the sense that it attributes reality to the relational structure of a scienti c theory. Given the in uence that both these thinkers had on the founders of logical empiricism, it is not surprising that aspects of this theme reappear in their work. But we should not expect that the assimilation is at all straightforward. For, in the rst place, the conventionalisms that Poincar and Duhem coupled with their realism differed in important respects. Certainly, there are complexities and ambiguities in the conventionalist realism of Schlick, as we shall see. And in the second place, structural scienti c realism was being developed in a rather different way by another thinker whose views had a signi cant effect on early logical empiricism, Ernst Cassirer.
32 33
P. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, translated by P. P. Wiener (Princeton, NJ., Princeton University Press, 1954) pp. 268. Duhem, op.cit. (note 32) p. 32.
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3 The rst edition of Duhems Aim and Structure of Physical Theory was published in 1906. It was in that year that Ernst Cassirer accepted a position at Berlin University where he was to remain as privatdozent until 1919. He was one among a group of so-called Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers, including Paul Natorp and Hermann Cohen, working in the rst two decades of this century. In using the label neo-Kantian we need to appreciate that the fundamental contrast for many German philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was between the Kantian critical philosophy and the positivism of, for example, Mach.34 The divergent approaches of these two philosophies to the epistemology of mathematics and the exact sciences was particularly important. Of the very many ways to express this contrast perhaps the simplest is in terms of attitudes towards synthetic a priori knowledge. For Kantians, some knowledge is, or is like, synthetic a priori knowledge; for positivists there is no such knowledge. Bearing in mind that there can be many different understandings of synthetic a priori knowledge, not all of which would have been recognized, still less accepted, by Kant himself, it is evident that there is considerable scope for the development of different kinds of neo-Kantianism. For many, though not all, an alternative way of expressing the same contrast was in terms of pure intuition: the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge required the possibility of pure intuition. For Kant and the neo-Kantians, though not for the positivists, the central philosophical problem was to nd a way of securing not the certainty or reliability of empirical knowledge but its objectivity, given that our experience
34
See for example R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, translated by R. George (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969) 75: Positivism has emphasized that the only material of cognition consists in the undigested experientially given. It is here that we have to look for the basic elements of the constructional system. Transcendental idealism, especially the Neo-Kantian school (Rickert, Cassirer, Bauch), has justly emphasized that these elements do not suf ce. Order concepts, our basic relations, must be added. This in uential monograph was originally published as Der logische Aufbau der Welt, (BerlinSchlachtensee, WeltkreisVerlag, 1928). For an example of the way in which Kant and Mach represent opposite trends, see M. Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, Library of Exact Philosophy XI, translated by A. E. Blumberg (Vienna, SpringerVerlag, 1974, esp. ch.3: Problems of Reality). This is a translation of the second edition of Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Berlin, Springer, 1925). The rst edition was published in 1918. Cf. J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, edited by L. Wessells (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 1: Within the eld of epistemology one may discern three major currents of thought in the nineteenth century: positivism, Kantianism, and what I propose to call the semantic tradition. What distinguished their proponents primarily was their attitude to the a priori. Positivists denied it, and Kantians explained it through the Copernican revolution. The semantic tradition consisted of those who believed in the a priori but not in the constitutive powers of the mind.
34
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is essentially private and subjective. 35 In terms of the distinction between form and content, since the content of experience is subjective we must nd a way of using its form to underwrite the objectivity of the knowledge it yields and thereby bridge, as it were, the gap between thought and reality. Put brie y, if crudely, Kants claim was that it is a ground or condition of the intelligibility of subjective experience that we contribute to it a form supplied by pure understanding. There is a part of scienti c knowledge, therefore, which does not derive from experience, but results from applying to subjective experience what Kant calls the pure concepts of the understanding. And this part of science the non-empirical part as it were makes empirical knowledge possible.36 It consists of synthetic truths known a priori, and transcendental logic is the study of these truths. There are, that is to say, formal or structural features of our experience which are provided by us and which make objective empirical knowledge possible. The Marburg neo-Kantians set themselves the task of articulating a view of this kind, taking into account the advances in the exact sciences, including Einsteins new and revolutionary ideas about space, time and gravitation, the introduction of a more rigorous approach to analysis in mathematics, and the consequences of the new logic of classes and relations developed by Frege and Russell.37 This last development was particularly important because it was seen as providing the elements of a new transcendental logic. And with the aid of the logically necessary laws of thought supplied by this
35
36
37
Cf. T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): p. 66: in the method of Erkenntniskritik . . . the concern is not the justi cation per se of scienti c knowledge (for such knowledge is not in dispute, at least in the exact sciences), but rather with how the objectivity of this knowledge is constituted. For example, Kant in his Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics, translated by P. G. Lucas (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1953), p. 56 said: Empirical judgements, so far as they have objective validity, are judgements of experience. . . . [They] always need . . . special concepts originally generated in the understanding, and it is these that make the judgements of experience objectively valid. Cf. M. Friedman, Geometry, convention, and the relativized a priori: Reichenbach, Schlick, and Carnap, in W. C. Salmon and G. Wolters (eds) Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scienti c Theories (Pittsburgh and Konstanz, Pittsburgh University Press and Universittsverlag Konstanz, 1994). Friedman distinguishes between the constitutive principles of the non-empirical part of science, and the laws of empirical science. P. Natorps Die logischen Grundlagen der exacten Wissenschaften, Wissenschaft und Hypothese, vol.12 (Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1910) contained the rst important philosophical study of relativity theory. For comments on this study see D. Howard, Einstein and Eindeutigkeit: a neglected theme in the philosophical background to General Relativity, in J. Eisenstaedt and A. J. Kox (eds) Studies in the History of General Relativity, Einstein Studies, vol.3 (Boston, Birkhuser, 1992) pp. 187 92; D. Howard, Einstein, Kant, and the origins of logical empiricism, in W. C. Salmon and G. Wolters (eds), Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scienti c Theories (Pittsburgh and Konstanz, Pittsburgh University Press and Universittsverlag Konstanz, 1994) pp. 501; D. Howard, Relativity, Eindeutigkeit, and monomorphism: Rudolf Carnap and the development of the categoricity concept in formal semantics, in R. N. Giere and A. W. Richardson (eds) Origins of Logical Positivism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.16 (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1996) pp. 133 5.
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logic we can, in the exact sciences at least, transform subjective experience into objective knowledge of reality.38 Cassirers principal contribution to Marburg neo-Kantianism was his book Substance and Function, rst published in 1910. The overall aim of the arguments advanced in this book is that of dispensing with concepts of substance in science in favour of concepts of relations or functions.39 Those arguments build upon the logicism of Russell and others in showing, as Cassirer puts it, that mathematics is representable as nothing other than a special application of the general logic of relations; however, the relation concept in turn goes back to the more fundamental idea of functionality .40 Instead of presupposing, in accordance with the emphasis on
See M. Friedman, Epistemology in the Aufbau, Synthese 93 (1992): pp. 22 4, for a brief but helpful characterization of neo-Kantian themes. According to Cassirer transcendental logic is still synthetic; it receives its justi cation through its grounding of the objectivity of empirical science see W. Sauer, On the Kantian background of neopositivism, Topoi 8 (1989): 116; A. W. Richardson, Logical idealism and Carnaps construction of the world, Synthese 93 (1992): 66; and T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): 62. For further explanation of this important aspect of Cassirers Substance and Function, see T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): 66: Cassirer discerns in the recent development of the exact sciences:
1
38
39
A transition from the species or generic concept (Gattungsbegriff), to the concept of Function (Funktionsbegriff). The generic concept, according to the traditional logic (of Aristotle), is formed through abstraction; from the particulars of the individuals falling under it, those common features belonging to all are isolated. Whereas the concept of function . . . stems from the new logic of the mathematical concept of function. 1 (Cassirer, Substance and Function, p. 21)
40
There is a strikingly wide variety of contexts in which the notion of function operated in the early years of this century. Frege used it to signify the sense of incomplete or unsaturated expressions, such as predicate expressions. When provided with an argument, i.e. the sense of a referring expression, a function generates the content of a thought, true or false. Thus Fregean functions, like mathematical functions, have objects as values. Russell, in introducing the idea of a propositional function, intended something similar. William James, though, used the notion of function in a very different way; for him consciousness was a function, and we need, therefore, a functionalist theory of mind. For comments on the relation between functionalism in this sense, and structuralism, see S. Shapiro, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) pp. 106 8. E. Cassirer, Kant und die moderne Mathematik, Kant-Studien 12 (1907): 7. The passage is quoted in T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): 63, which draws attention to Russells comment in his Principles of Mathematics, second edition. (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1937), 263 4: In its most general form, functionality does not differ from relation . . . It is important . . . to observe that propositional functions . . . are more fundamental than other functions, or even than relations. For most purposes, it is convenient to identify the function and the relation, i.e. if y = f(x) is equivalent to xRy, where R is a relation, it is convenient to speak of R as the function . . . the reader, however, should remember that the idea of functionality is more fundamental than that of relation.
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subject-predicate judgements, that the relation of a thing to its properties has primacy, we must make relations themselves the focus of our thinking. What matters about a thing, whether it be mathematical or physical, is not what it is in itself but how it relates to other things and how it functions that is to say how it is co-ordinated with respect to them. Helping himself to hindsight, Cassirer intends to show that:
the concept of function constitutes the general schema and model according to which the modern concept of nature has been molded in its progressive historical development 41 . . . The logical development of natural science tends more and more to a recognition that the original, nave representations of matter are super uous; at most we grant them the value of pictorial representations, and recognise the quantitative relations, that prevail between phenomena, as what is truly substantial in them.
Nave representations of matter are discarded not so much because we judge them to be wrong as that they are unnecessary. And it is clear that he sees this development as entirely in keeping with Kants understanding of science, for the Critique of Pure Reason clearly taught that all we know of matter are mere relations.42 Elsewhere he says:
we must choose between . . . two views of the world: either with empiricism we must assume as existent only what can be pointed out as an individual in the real presentation, or with idealism, af rm the existence of structures, which constitute the intellectual conclusion of certain series of presentations, but which can never themselves be directly presented.
The empiricist, in Cassirers view, is the person who imagines behind the world of perceptions a new existence built up out of the materials of sensations. Reality is, then, a logical construction out of sensations. This is clearly a reference to the positivism of Mach. But the idealist perhaps better critical idealist traces the universal intellectual schemata, in
41
42
E. Cassirer, Substance and Function, and Einsteins Theory of Relativity, translated by W. C. Swabey and M. C. Swabey (New York, Dover Publications, 1953) p. 21. Originally published as Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen ber die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin, Bruno Cassirer, 1910) and as Zur Einsteinschen Relativittstheorie: Erkenntnis theoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin, Bruno Cassirer, 1921) Cf. D. Howard, Relativity, Eindeutigkeit, and monomorphism: Rudolf Carnap and the development of the categoricity concept in formal semantics, in R. N. Giere and A. W. Richardson (eds) Origins of Logical Positivism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.16 (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1996) pp. 1336. Cassirer, op.cit. (note 41) p. 261. Cassirer is quoting from Kants Critique of Pure Reason, B.341:
1
All that we know in matter is merely relations (what we call the inner determinations of it are inward only in a comparative sense), but among these relations some are selfsubsistent and permanent, and through these we are given a determinate object.
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which the relations and connections of perceptions can be perfectly represented. So, for an idealist, the objects of physics: matter and force, atom and ether can no longer be misunderstood as so many new realities for investigation, and realities whose inner essence is to be penetrated. Rather: Atom and ether, mass and force are nothing but examples of such schemata, and ful ll their purpose so much the better, the less they contain of direct perceptual content. Science is not concerned, as the empiricist supposes, with the reality of things; but the theoretical concepts it uses, though they have no direct intuitive content, have a necessary function in the shaping and construction of intuitive reality. They are able to function in this way because they are concerned not with the perceptible properties of the empirical objects, like their colour or taste, but with relations of these empirical objects.43 We need to appreciate that Cassirers Kant is a generalized Kant. He fully accepts that no philosopher can claim any longer that the principles of Newtonian mechanics or of Euclidean geometry are in some sense indispensable or otherwise privileged. But like his Marburg colleagues he wants to claim, as Kant had, that the exact sciences provide our paradigm of real objective knowledge. And he also wants to claim that something is indispensable for such knowledge, and he believes that the implication of recent developments in the mathematical and physical sciences is that this indispensable something is structural and relational rather than substantial. It is, as he puts it, a universal invariant theory of experience in which the attempt is made to discover those universal elements of form, that persist through all change in the particular material content of experience. Using language that is clearly Kantian in tone, he continues: The categories of space and time, of magnitude and the functional dependency of magnitudes, etc. are established as such elements of form, which cannot be lacking in any empirical judgment or system of judgments.44 Not surprisingly, we find that in pursuing his aim Cassirer traces many of the steps towards structural scientific realism. He uses, for example, Helmholtzs theory of signs: our sensations and presentations, he says, are signs (Zeichen), not copies (Abbilden) of objects. Signs, unlike copies, do not need to be in any way similar to what they signify or designate. But if this is so, how can experience, and the sciences we construct with its help, inform us about objects? The answer to this crucial question is, as Cassirer expresses it, that what is retained in [the sign] is not the special character of the signified thing, but the objective relations, in which it stands to others like it. He adds: The manifold of sensations is correlated with the manifold of real objects in such a way, that each connection, which can be
43 44
Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) pp. 123, 165 6, 229. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) pp. 268 9. Cf. A. W. Richardson, Logical idealism and Carnaps construction of the world, Synthese 93 (1992): 67.
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established in one group, indicates a connection in the other. 45 So, in accordance with an abstract analytic treatment of physical theory, the concepts used in the exact sciences are conventional signs rather than natural representations of reality. 46 These sciences, therefore, do not inform us about real objects; but nevertheless even though the correlation or coordination (Zuordnung) between theory and reality is conventional rather than natural, the relational structure of reality will be represented in theory. Theories in the exact sciences, then, can inform us about real structural relations though not about how these structural relations are realized. Thus Cassirer says:
we do not know, indeed, the real absolutely in its isolated, self-existent properties, but we rather know the rules under which this real stands and in accordance with which it changes. What we discover clearly and as a fact without any hypothetical addition is the law in the phenomenon. 47
For example, we do not know, or need to know, what chlorine is; it is enough if we know that, in appropriate circumstances, it reacts with other substances, such as sodium, in law-like ways. This knowledge is fully objective. It is, as Cassirer explains, knowledge of real relations: The objects of physics are thus, in their connection according to law, not so much signs of something objective as rather objective signs, that satisfy certain conceptual conditions and demands. It follows, he concludes, that we never know things as they are in themselves, but only in their mutual relations. 48 How, though, is this claim to knowledge of real relations, or functional capacities, justified?49 For Cassirer, an implication of what had been taking place in mathematics and the exact sciences in the nineteenth century was that Kants faculty of pure intuition must be rejected. Mathematics and geometry, according to Dedekind and Hilbert, were not about intuited mathematical and geometrical entities. Dedekind, for example, together with Cantor and Weierstrass, had sought to establish the rigour
45 46 47
48 49
Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 304. Cf. T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): p. 69. It was Heinrich Hertz who, in his Bildtheorie, applied Helmholtzs Zeichentheorie to theoretical science. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 304. Thus, if we wanted to picture the fact that Edinburgh is north of London we would use a symbol to represent Edinburgh and another symbol to represent London, and these two symbols would have to be related to each other in a way which serves to indicate the geographical relation of Edinburgh and London. We might, for example, place the symbol representing Edinburgh on top of the symbol representing London. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 304. The function, or functional capacity, of an object, in Cassirers terminology, is identi ed in terms of its relation to other objects. Thus, chlorine has a functional capacity to combine with sodium.
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of mathematical analysis by dispensing with any appeal to intuition of mathematical entities or to intuitive certainties in definitions of them. After suggesting that Dedekind appears to base the concept of pure number on the traditional logical doctrine of a plurality of things, Cassirer points out that these things . . . are not assumed as independent existences present anterior to any relation, but they gain their whole being . . . first in and with the relations which are predicated of them. This is not because there is something especially mysterious about these things which in itself makes intuition of them problematic; rather, if we follow Dedekinds approach, they are terms of relations and as such can never be given in isolation but only in ideal community with each other. As a result of the new sensitivity to rigor in mathematics, the claim to grasp the substance of things in number has indeed been gradually withdrawn.50 There is then no role for intuition in arithmetic, for according to the new way of thinking what is . . . expressed is just this: that there is a system of ideal objects whose whole content is exhausted in their mutual relations. The essence of the numbers is completely expressed in their positions.51 This rejection of intuition is coupled with the claim that the new logic of Frege and Russell, by placing a greater value on relation-concepts than on thing-concepts, requires that the a priori ground or condition of objective knowledge in the exact sciences should stress the role of structure and
50
51
Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) pp. 36, 27. More and more, Cassirer says, the tendency of modern mathematics is to subordinate the given elements as such and allow them no influence on the general form of proof (Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 99). Cf. A. W. Richardson, Logical idealism and Carnaps construction of the world, Synthese 93 (1992): 64. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 39. The same point is made with regard to geometry:
1
For all these propositions [of non-Euclidean geometry] only express a system of relations, while they make no final determination of the character of the individual members, which enter into these relations. The points, with which they are concerned, are not independent things, to which in and for themselves certain properties are ascribed, but they are merely the assumed termini of the relation itself and gain through it all their character. 1 (Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 110)
See also Cassirers comment on Hilberts geometry as pure theory of relations:

1
The determination of the individuality of the elements is not the beginning but the end of the conceptual development; it is the logical goal, which we approach by the progressive connection of universal relations. The procedure of mathematics here points to the analogous procedure of theoretical natural science, for which it contains the key and the justi cation. 1 (Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 94)
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relations.52 It requires this because our experience results in knowledge that is objective only in so far as it is grounded in this logic. So, just as in geometry the real object of geometrical interest is seen to be only the relational connection between the elements as such, and not the individual properties of those elements, so also the conceptual construction of exact physics proves to be dominated by a corresponding logical procedure. This is not to deny, of course, that experiment is necessary to analyse an originally undifferentiated perceptual whole into its particular constitutive elements, but nevertheless:
To mathematical theory belongs the determination of the form by which these elements are combined into a unity of law. The system of possible relational syntheses already developed in mathematics affords the fundamental schema for the connections, which thought seeks in the material of the real. As to which of the possible relational connections are actually realized in experience, experiment, in its result, gives its answer. 53
Plainly, Cassirers structuralism is motivated by the conviction that the insights of Kants transcendental logic, once divested of their dependence on superseded natural philosophy, can legitimate the exact sciences as paradigms of knowledge. They do this by virtue of the emphasis they place on the role of logical form in ensuring the objectivity of knowledge in the exact sciences. A Kantian critical philosophy will thus provide a logic of objective knowledge.54 This logic the logic of Frege and Russell in supplying the structure required for objectivity provides formal components of knowledge. But for Cassirer, as for Kant, the structure supplied by logic is highly generalized. It is the structure of any possible mathematical physics yielding objective knowledge which is real, not the structure of some speci c theory in the exact sciences. For Cassirer, the reality revealed by the mathematical sciences is a reality of abstract structures. Such an austere version
52
See, for example, B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, second edition (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1937) p. 8: Speaking generally, we ought to deal, in every branch of mathematics, with any class of entities whose mutual relations are of a speci ed type; thus the class, as well as the particular term considered, becomes a variable, and the only true constants are the types of relations and what they involve. Cf. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) p. 40: Wherever a system of conditions is given that can be realized in different contents, there we can hold to the form of the system itself as an invariant, undisturbed by the difference of the contents, and develop its laws deductively. Cassirer, op. cit. (note 41) pp. 251, 257. Cf. T. A. Ryckman, Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Cassirer and Schlick, Synthese 88 (1991): 61. E. Cassirer, Kant und die moderne Mathematik, Kant-Studien 12 (1907): 44.
1 1
53 54
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of structural realism did not, though, survive the scrutiny of those of Cassirers contemporaries who were to become founders of logical empiricism. This is not at all surprising given that there were others, whose views were important for logical empiricism and who had been developing the idea of structural realism in a very different way. 55 4 When Substance and Function was published in 1910, Moritz Schlick (1882 1936) was 29 years old and beginning to make his reputation as an independently-minded philosopher. After having spent three years studying philosophy at the University of Zurich, he was appointed to his rst academic position at Rostock in 1910, and in the same year he published his rst substantial philosophical papers in the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science. The call to succeed Mach and Boltzmann in the Chair of the History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in the University of Vienna lay some years in the future. So did the Thursday evening meetings which he initiated shortly after he accepted that chair and which we now associate with the Vienna Circle, though some of those who were to become members of that circle, such as Otto Neurath, the Hahns, and Philip Frank were already meeting and discussing ideas they were to take up later. Carnap was an undergraduate studying philosophy and mathematics in Jena under Frege and Bruno Bauch, a prominent neo-Kantian. Wittgenstein was still in Manchester, studying engineering. 56 In 1904 Schlick had completed a doctoral dissertation, dealing with the re ection of light in a non-homogeneous medium, under the supervision of Max Planck in Berlin, and it was no doubt his background in the physical sciences which led him, early in his thinking, to pay attention to their philosophical aspects and implications.57 It is entirely possible, too, that he will have had his interest stimulated by Einstein who began his academic appointment at the University of Zurich in 1909, when Schlick was writing his rst substantial philosophical paper entitled The nature of truth in modern logic. As its title indicates, this is an ambitious and comprehensive study of the nature and criteria of truth in both factual and conceptual
55
56
57
For further discussion of Cassirers view and an account of their relevance in Carnaps early philosophy, see A. W. Richardson, Logical idealism and Carnaps construction of the world, Synthese 93 (1992): 6370, and A. W. Richardson, Carnaps Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch.5. There is some information about Schlicks life in E. T. Gadol (ed.) Rationality and Science: A Memorial Volume for Moritz Schlick in Celebration of the Centennial of His Birth (Vienna and New York, SpringerVerlag, 1982). The title of Schlicks dissertation was Ueber die Re exion des Lichtes in einer inhomogenen Schicht, Berlin, 1904.
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judgements. Like others writing about truth at this time, Schlick expresses dissatisfaction with the theories of truth then on offer. In particular, he rejects what he describes as the oldest and most natural account of the nature of truth . . . according to which it consists in a correspondence. The dif culty is, he says, that the correspondence in question is that between thought and things, and these things have usually been understood as Kantian things-in-themselves. On such an understanding however, it is quite clear that because of the unknowability of these transcendent thingsin-themselves the truth of any thought would always be beyond our reach. And we are no better off, Schlick claims, if the things with which thought must correspond are understood as accessible to experience. For that means that they will be thoughts themselves, and then truth would become a matter of correspondence of thought with itself; in effect, the truth or otherwise of a thought would be determined by its coherence with other thoughts. At the heart of these familiar problems is, of course, the realization that the different versions of the correspondence theory of truth suffer chie y from an inadequate elucidation of the concept of correspondence they employ.58 What, then, does Schlick propose as a suitable de nition of truth? His answer is surprising and, at rst sight, unpromising. He begins with the claim that just as mental sensations and ideas are subjective signs designating real or conceptual things, such as snow or the number two, so the judgements or propositions we consider should be thought of as subjective signs for the order or form or structure of these things.59 Judgments, he says in his General Theory of Knowledge, are signs for relations among objects.60 Thus, the (true) judgement that snow is cold is a sign for the structure of the real fact that snow is cold, and the (true) judgement that 2 3 2 = 4 is a sign for the structure of the conceptual fact that 2 3 2 = 4. Those sequences of words we call declarative sentences are, of course, signs of judgements or propositions. In accordance with Helmholtzs Zeichentheorie, the concepts occurring in judgements are co-ordinated or correlated with the real objects they designate, but they do not correspond with them in the sense of being images or pictures of them. We must, Schlick says, beware of supposing a
58
59 60
M. Schlick, The nature of truth in modern logic, in H. L. Mulder and B. F. B. van de VeldeSchlick (eds) Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, vol.1 (1909 1922), translated by P. Heath (Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979) pp. 60 1, 68. Originally published as Das Wesen der Wahrheit nach der modernen Logik, in Vierteljahrsschrift fr wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie 34 (1910): 386 477. Schlick, op. cit. (note 58), p. 91. M. Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge. Library of Exact Philosophy XI, translated by A. E. Blumberg (Vienna, Springer-Verlag, 1974), p. 40. Cf. Schlick op. cit. (note 58), p. 91:
1
All judgements serve to designate for us the form of what is given in experience, in the same sense as sensations and ideas designate for us the content of experience. . . . Just as ideas stand for the what, for things and properties, so judgments stand for facts.
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judgement to be something more than a mere sign for the form of the material, and to be capable of describing this form adequately in some fashion.61 And similarly, the relations between real things which are coordinated or correlated with the judgements which designate them do not correspond with relations between concepts in the sense that the latter are images or pictures of them. For, Schlick explains, temporal aspects always enter into [relations between real things], and usually spatial aspects as well, whereas conceptual relations are non-temporal and non-spatial. So, in the judgement The chair is to the right of the table, the concept chair is not placed to the right of the concept table .62 The rst dif culty with this way of proceeding is that if judgements are no more than subjective private signs then they cannot be regarded as possessing truth or falsity. They will only be true or false in so far as they can be understood to relate to an object, i.e. can be understood as objective. How does thought, expressed in judgements, come to have this character and to be, as we say, about reality? If the reality is metaphysical, as in the case of Kants things-in-themselves, then because of the unbridgeable gulf between thought and such a reality objective judgements will be impossible. We need a conception of reality which will make objective judgement possible. And as we have seen, according to neo-Kantianism, as expressed by Cassirer for example, we obtain that conception by applying the a priori rules of pure logic and pure mathematics to the subjective data of experience. It is, then, in the idealizations of mathematical natural sciences that we will nd the objectivity we seek; the conception of reality those sciences provide an idealized reality is essentially logical and mathematical. These sciences will, of course, contain judgements which incorporate signs designating the content of experience, but the judgements themselves will be signs of the structure of experience and will, if they are to be objective, be logical and mathematical signs of that structure. It is plain that the objectivity of judgements, and the reality that objective judgements designate, is a matter of their structure of form, rather than their content. Schlicks concern, though, is not so much with the objectivity of judgements as with their truth. If judgements are signs of states of affairs, and if, as Schlick assumes, such judgements are the primary bearers of truth and falsehood, it seems that the difference between a true judgement and a false one will be a difference between two kinds of sign. Some signs of states of affairs will be true judgements and some will be false judgements. But, Schlick says, the only kinds of sign that there can be are those that designate univocally and those that do not. For example, a road traf c sign designating a junction can, and should be, unambiguous, but it can be, and sometimes is, ambiguous. So the difference between true and false judgements must coincide with the difference between univocal and equivocal
61 62
Schlick, op. cit. (note 58) p. 93. Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) p. 61.
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signs, and we are naturally drawn to the conclusion that a true judgement is one that designates univocally, and a false judgement is one that designates equivocally: a judgment that uniquely designates a set of facts is called true.63 But this way of de ning truth does not seem right. Univocality in a proposition is, in many and perhaps all circumstances, a virtue but it is not the virtue of truth. Othellos belief that Desdemona loves Cassio is not false because it lacks univocality; it is not an equivocal belief, and Iagos belief that she loves no-one but Othello is not true because it is univocal. To quote one recent commentator on Schlicks account of the nature of truth and falsity, the existence of true but ambiguous propositions is suf cient to show how silly is this way of conceiving the nature of falsehood.64 However, this objection misunderstands Schlicks view. Truth is not a matter of linguistic ambiguity or equivocation or lack of it. Judgements are signs, but they are not linguistic signs. The univocality of a judgement is a matter of one-to-one co-ordination between the judgement and what it designates. We have, on the one hand judgements or propositions, and on the other hand facts, and where there is a one-to-one co-ordination between a judgement and a fact then the judgement is true. According to the familiar view, the truth of a judgement consists in its correspondence or agreement with the facts, but the central puzzle with this view is what is meant by correspondence or agreement. Schlicks claim is that there can be nothing more to correspondence than co-ordination. 65 So, when we say that a judgement is true because it corresponds with the facts, we must mean that it is true because it co-ordinates, univocally, with the facts; and when we say that a judgement is false because it fails to correspond with the facts, we must mean that it is false because it fails to co-ordinate, univocally, with the facts. So of course a linguistically ambiguous sentence can be true and will be true when one of the judgements it ambiguously expresses co-ordinates univocally with the facts. Failure of unique designation, or univocal co-ordination entails that the co-ordination is equivocal. For example, Schlick explains, a prediction is a sign for an expected set of facts foreseen in
63 64
65
Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) p. 60. Cf. Schlick, op. cit. (note 58) p. 94: A judgment is true if it univocally designates a speci c state-of-affairs. D. Howard, Relativity, Eindeutigkeit, and monomorphism: Rudolf Carnap and the development of the categoricity concept in formal semantics, in R. N. Giere and A. W. Richardson (eds) Origins of Logical Positivism, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.16, (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1996) p. 126; cf. J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition From Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station, in Linda Wessells (ed.) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1991) pp. 1779. Thus Schlick says:
1
the nature of truth does really rest on a correspondence; but by this we should wish to understand no more than the one-to-one coordination of judgments with facts . . . In so saying, we think we have merely brought out what everyone has a more or less clear idea of, when they explain truth as correspondence of thought with its objects. 1 (Schlick, op. cit. (note 58) p. 99)
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imagination and is a sign also for the set of facts that actually appears. If these two sets of facts anticipated and actual are different and the sign is therefore ambiguous between them, then we would quite naturally say that the prediction is false.66 Clearly, for Schlick facts are what judgements designate irrespective of whether the judgements are true or false. In a judgement, he says, we always think of a designation as having actually been carried out, a co-ordination as having been consummated.67 If the judgement is true then the facts it designates coincide with the existing facts and the judgement is therefore univocal and designates uniquely. If the judgement is false then the facts it designates differ from the existing facts and the judgement is therefore equivocal and does not designate uniquely. In the case of science, then, where judgements take the form of theories, we seek to provide information about the form or relational structure of reality, rather than about its content. This distinction, between form and content, is one that Schlick is able to sustain with the aid of his well-known contrast between conceptual knowledge and intuitive acquaintance. 68 As against those who claimed that genuine knowledge is only possible where we have direct acquaintance with, or intuition of, the subject matter or content of judgements, Schlick claims that it is a mistake to con ate knowledge with acquaintance. There is no such thing as knowledge by acquaintance; instead, there is a distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and acquaintance
66
Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) p. 62. He gives as another example the false judgment A light ray consists of a stream of rapidly moving particles:
1
By examining all the facts taught us by physical research, we soon become aware that this judgement does not provide a unique designation of the facts. That is to say, we nd that two different classes of facts are coordinated to the same judgements, that therefore an ambiguity is present. On the one hand, we have the facts that actually do involve moving corpuscles, as in the case of cathode rays; on the other hand, we have a different set of facts, namely, those of the propagation of light, designated by the very same symbols. Moreover, at the same time different signs are coordinated to two identical series of facts, namely, those of the propagation of light and those of wave propagation. Uniqueness is forfeited and the proof that this is so is also the proof that the judgment is false. 1 (Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) p. 62)
67
68
In an early unpublished essay Schlick repeats this example; see M. Schlick, What is knowing?, in H. L. Mulder and B. F. B. van de Velde-Schlick (eds) Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, vol.1 (1909 1922), translated by P. Heath (Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), p. 137. There is a brief, and less clear, account of false judgement in Schlick, op. cit. (note 58) p. 97. Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) p. 65. An implication of this is that a judgement designates not merely a relation, but the existence of a relation. Cf. Schlick, op. cit. (note 66) p. 135: That which is expressed in a judgment is always a fact. Or, if the judgement happens to be false, at least an alleged fact. Cf. M. Friedman, Helmholtzs Zeichentheorie and Schlicks Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre: early logical empiricism and its nineteenth century background, forthcoming, p. 6: Schlicks central distinction is between conceptual knowledge and intuitive acquaintance.
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on the other. Knowledge, unlike intuition or acquaintance, must involve the application of concepts. In knowledge we always put two objects into relation with one another, whereas in acquaintance we confront just one object. For, so long as an object is not compared with anything, it is not incorporated in some way into a conceptual system, just so long it is not known. Of course the content, or subject matter, of scienti c theories is not accessible to us in any direct sense; we are not acquainted with it. But this is not in itself a problem for even if we were acquainted with that content, we would still lack knowledge. Instead we use the claims of theories as implicit de nitions of content: in theoretical physics, Schlick says:
it is a familiar fact that essentially different phenomena may nevertheless obey the same formal laws. The same equation may represent quite different natural phenomena depending on the physical meanings we assign to the quantities that occur in it . . . We conclude that a strictly deductive construction of a scienti c theory . . . has nothing to do with the intuitive picture we form of the primitive concepts.
In effect, scienti c knowledge, like all knowledge, must be propositional; it must therefore involve the application of concepts. And as conveyed in the true judgements which constitute theories in the exact sciences, propositional knowledge takes the form of equations. In so far as we have knowledge of what electricity, or gravitation is, or what atoms are, it will depend solely on the relational claims of theories about electricity, or about atoms, as expressed in scienti c laws. So, as Schlick puts it: Maxwells equations disclose to us the essence of electricity, Einsteins equations the essence of gravitation. With their help, we are able in principle to answer all questions that can be raised with regard to the objects of nature.69 What, though, of this reality whose structure is described by true scienti c theories? Is it, or rather is its structure, to be understood as an external and mind-independent truth-maker for the judgements of scienti c theories? Though Schlick was, and remained a scienti c realist, his answer to this question cannot be an unquali ed yes. He is enough of a Kantian to appreciate that a dogmatic realism which does not help us understand how our cognitive powers are able to grasp reality cannot be satisfactory. Some scienti c principles must be imposed by us on reality, rather than by reality on us, if our experience and consequent scienti c theorizing are to count as experience of and theorizing about an objective reality. There are, that is to say, principles which are constitutive of the objects of experience and theory. We are able to cognitively grasp reality because some of the features or aspects of that reality, expressed in these constitutive principles, are of our making. Kant had described these principles as having an a priori guarantee, but Schlick is also enough of an empiricist to resist the thought that there is anything in our cognitive grasp which is unrevisable in the light
69
Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) pp. 823, 35 6, 242.
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of experience. And in any case the speci c principles which Kant had thought a priori had been shown to be neither necessary nor even true. One way of satisfying the pull of Kant and of empiricism is to adopt a version of conventionalism as advocated by Poincar, and there are some explicit indications that this was the solution favoured by Schlick. Some commentators have indeed attributed to him a view they call realistic conventionalism.70 According to this view some claims in scienti c theories, namely the constitutive principles, will be accepted as true by convention. That is to say, those adopting the theory will regard the claims as true, not because the empirical evidence available determines their truth, or because our cognitive powers are such that they cannot but be accepted, but because we have chosen to regard them as true. Constitutive principles are not conrmed by evidence, as empirical laws are; indeed the adoption by convention of these principles makes possible the con rmation of empirical laws.71 But a Poincaran conventionalism endorses Kant to the extent of admitting that, as Poincar acknowledged in The Value of Science, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible.72 The world, or reality, must be internal to the extent necessary to make it accessible, and it is our conventions which provide this internality. Theories in the exact sciences provide us with information about the structure of this world, and the constitutive principles incorporated into those theories should be thought of as conventions selected by us, making the structure of reality dependent on us and, in that sense, internal. My conclusion, then, is that structural realism is a theme that enables us to link Schlicks pre-positivism with Cassirers neo-Kantianism. But their routes to structural realism were very different: for Cassirer it is the consequence of the attempt to secure the objectivity of scienti c knowledge; for Schlick it is the outcome of his view about the nature of truth. The contrast between their approaches helps to illuminate, I suggest, the extent and nature of the Kantianism attributed to the founders of logical empiricism. Structural realism is a view readily associated with Kant, as Cassirer shows; but it is plain that Schlick found himself drawn to such a view by the epistemology he developed in conscious opposition to a positivistic kind of empiricism. But the convergence of Cassirer and Schlick on structural realism is not accidental. Both men seek to defend a realists understanding of the exact sciences; they do so
70 71
72
D. Howard, Realism and conventionalism in Einsteins philosophy of science: the EinsteinSchlick correspondence, Philosophia Naturalis 21 (1984): 619. Reichenbach made this point by distinguishing between axioms of coordination and axioms of connection. The former, as constitutive principles, have a completely different status to the latter, as physical laws; see H. Reichenbach, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, translated and edited by M. Reichenbach (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University Press, 1965) p. 93. Originally published as Relativittstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori (Berlin, Springer, 1920). Poincar, op. cit. (note 26) p. 209.
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because in their view these sciences present us with a paradigm of objective knowledge. Neither is willing to endorse a nave or dogmatic realism which claims that by exercising our cognitive powers in accordance with the scienti c method, we can achieve in scienti c theories knowledge of a reality existing quite independently of those cognitive powers. It is important that the role of structural realism in the origins of logical empiricism is not exaggerated. That role should be set alongside the other themes which have been identi ed as playing a signi cant part in the thinking associated with those origins. In this paper I have been concerned to place the discussion of structural realism by Cassirer and Schlick in the appropriate historical setting, but of course these ideas played an important part in the development of Carnaps thought and from a broader point of view there can be little doubt that structural realism and logical empiricism are bound up with each other to a greater extent than I have indicated. This is not altogether surprising if we recall that Schlick and his fellow logical empiricists were reacting to neo-Kantianism, especially its Marburg variety. Schlick is severe in his attitude to the Marburg philosophers, and especially so in his critique of Cassirer on relativity, 73 but it would be surprising indeed if his opposition were to take the form of rejecting everything that he found in their work. As I have indicated, both Cassirer and Schlick were working in an intellectual context where structural realism was a commonly-held view about the exact sciences. Logical empiricism is, as its name implies, a variety of empiricism, but in so far as we can speak of its origins in the early thinking of Schlick we need to appreciate that it is a very highly quali ed empiricism, at least to the extent that it is capable of sustaining a version of scienti c realism. There is, though, a great deal more work that needs to be done to understand how, in the early years of this century epistemological positions were reconciled with the metaphysical commitments entailed by the physical sciences. In particular, we need to explore further the tensions within the conventionalism that was at the centre of this issue. Given the powerful and lasting effect that logical empiricism has had on philosophy of science in the twentieth century, the results of that exploration will make an important contribution to an understanding of our current preoccupations. 74 Department of Philosophy, University of Durham
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74
See M. Schlick, Critical or empiricist interpretation of modern physics, in H. L. Mulder and B. F. B. van de Velde-Schlick (eds) Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, vol.1 (1909 1922), translated by P. Heath (Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979) pp. 32234. Originally published in Kant-Studien 26 (1921): 96 111, as Kritizistische oder empiristische Deutung der neuen Physik. I am very grateful to a number of people for help in the preparation of this paper. I should especially thank Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Thomas Uebel, Colin Howson and an anonymous referee for good advice.
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Grower (2000) - Cassirer, Schick and Structural Realism

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8(1) 2000: 71 106

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

See also Cassirers comment on Hilberts geometry as pure theory of relations:

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

Schlick, op. cit. (note 60) pp. 823, 35 6, 242.

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

CASSIRER, SCHLICK AND STRUCTURAL REALISM

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