>Justin:Mach officially thought that theoretical entities were "elements,"
>neither
>mental nor physical.
>
>^^^^^^
>
>CB: Sort of like heuristic devices.
>
>^^^^^^^
Hm. Not exactly. He wasn't Vaihiger, who was an out-and-out fictionalist.
The thought there were elements, jsut that they were not ultimately mental
or physical.
>^^^^^^^^
>
>CB: Lenin categorizes Mach as idealist and dualist , a la Kant (i.e.
>"shamedface materialists", agnostics in Engels categories) .
Well, Kant is not a dualist. He is a transcendental idealist and and empirical realist (his own terms), which means, roughly--very very very roughly--that from within experience it's necessarily true that material objects exist outside in space (this is empirical realism), but apart from the transcendental conditions of experience (space, time, and causality, again very roughly), which are in a sense ideal, contributed by our minds, there is no knowledge of thingsa s they are in themselves. But there are things in themselves that affect us, we don't contribute them. So it's not easy to say whether K is an idealist in the sense that Lenin and Engels meant. Mach's views are nowhere nearlya s interesting, they are basically warmed over watered down Hume.
>CB: Yes, Kant made an important scientific discovery too, that the solar
system has a history.
>
>^^^^^^^
Yes.
>>
>Justin: Einstein also thought that spacetime was real, which Mach did not.
>
>^^^^
>CB: This is the generalized point of the existence of objective reality.
But this is meaningless. Realism has to be piece by piece or it makes no sense. Does spacetime exist? Do atoms exist? There's no geberalizing it, or you get to the silly argument that Rakesh ran the other day, that if I'm a realist I ought to believe that value is real because that's what realists do, believe that things are real. I don't believe that ghosts or phlogiston are real.
>Lenin claims that Mach doesn't believe in objective reality. Just sense
>data, as you say , like Hume. The " We really only have direct experience
>of sense data" rap.
He _said_ he rejected that view, that's why he talked about "elements."
>So, Mach is a positivist , too, as everything relies on immediate sense
>data.
Well, he's a proto-positivist to be sure. I'm not sure taht is why, though. The logical positivists also followed Mach in denying taht onecould talk about the ultimate nature of theuniverse as sensations. Carnap's Logical Construction of the World starts from sensation, but Carnap insists that the choice of starting pointa s mental or physical is arbitrary; one can also construct the world from physical primitives.
>Einstein is anti-positivist too, as I think you mentioned his stubborn
>comment concerning an experiment not confirming relativity.
I think this is right, but it is more complex than that. Verificationist arguments of the sort put forth by the positivists played an important part in the concrete development of relativity theory. In fact. logical positivism came into be historically as an attempt to generalize the method of relativity physics. You can get a short very clear version of this in a few chapters of Larry Sklar's Westview book, Philosophy of Physics, a marvel of exposition.
jks
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