>>> farmelantj at juno.com 07/28/01 11:36AM >>>
On Sat, 28 Jul 2001 10:06:54 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> writes:
>
>
> >>> farmelantj at juno.com 07/22/01 06:35PM >>
>
> Another point, is that assuming that Justin has represented
> Posner's position correctly, then he sounds suspiciously
> like a pomo. Many other pomos have drawn upon views
> akin to Duhemian holism to justify a relativist epistemology,
> in ways that Quine would most certainly have disapproved.
>
> (((((((((((
>
> CB: Jim, at the beginning of the 20th Century, didn't a lot of
> Machians and other idealists attempt to use Einstein's relativity
> theory in physics and quantum mechanics theory ( such as
> Heisenberg's interpretation) to justify relatavist epistemology in a
> way that Einstein , Planck and others came to disagree with ?
Well, Mach himself was rather hostile to Einstein's theory of relativity.
((((((((
CB: Ok, But the other way around :Einstein was a Machian at first. Einstein admired Mach at the time he ( Einstein ) was developing relativity.
Also, for Einstein, his theory was more about invariance, as of the velocity of light, the opposite of relativity.
But for idealists, the notion of relativity of time and space was a basis for arguing for idealism against materialism and the existence of objective reality. And the Machians were a main school of idealist epistemology at the time.
((((((((
And he never accepted atoms either despite the fact that Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion, made a very persuasive case for their existence. (Mach thought that the only proper scientific concepts were those that could be defined directly in observational terms. He didn't think it possible to define atoms in such terms).
(((((((
CB: Yes, Mach was a positivist. "We only know sense data". Since, sense data don't give enough to us to accept much of the cause and effect etc. in the world, positivists like Mach end up being idealists, i.e. most of our theory is our minds' imposing it on the world. So , the theory of atoms is an idea not a physically real thing.
When Einstein met Mach ( in Mach's old age) face-to-face, he asked him if he believed in atoms, and Mach said yes , but later retracted
But having said this, many people did seem to think that relativity theory and quantum theory could be used for justifying relativist epistemologies. And much of this was rooted in Machian philosophies of science. BTW Pierre Duhem championed a philosophy of science that was rather akin to Mach's
Jim F.
>
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