Μάθημα : Ιστορία της Φιλοσοφίας της Επιστήμης (86Υ17) - Χειμερινό εξάμηνο 2025-26

The relation between the formal geometry of space and human experience of space is one of the oldest problems in philosophy. This problem has seemed to become even more serious with the concept of space-time in the special theory of relativity. In introducing the concept, Hermann Minkowski suggested that it is intuitively obvious. To later philosophers, however, the complex geometry of space-time appeared to stand in a more problematic relation to the space of experience, and the problem seemed to be further complicated by the general theory of relativity. An underlying problem, I argue, is a view of mathematical structure that obscured its connection with ordinary experience. This view was most explicitly advocated by the logical positivists, but they took their example from Einstein’s philosophical arguments for special relativity, and the implications of this view are still found in post-positive accounts. Its central assumption is that physical theories are essentially uninterpreted formal structures, requiring principles of interpretation to make genuinely synthetic claims about the empirical world. Einstein’s views, broadly speaking, reflected the influence and insight of Poincare and Hilbert regarding the empirical interpretation of mathematical structures. But his views also reflected a reductive form of empiricism, exemplified by his argument that all geometrical measurements can be reduced to observations of “point-coincidences”. This approach placed emphasis on the role of experience in an epistemological account of empirical content of theories, and away from its role in a scientific account of evidence for theories. When we examine experience in the latter role, as an evidentiary basis, we have a clearer view of the connection— as emphasized by Einstein— between physical theory and common sense. From this we arrive at a clearer view of the empirical significance of general relativity, as a novel theory of space-time structure, and the nature of the evidence for this dramatic conceptual shift. This way of thinking may illuminate, not only the nature of space-time structure, but also the more perplexing mathematical structures introduced by quantum mechanics.

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