Selected Papers On Epistemology And Physics

It was as a result of having known Juhos personally over many years that I became familiar with his thought. I met him and Viktor Kraft in Vienna soon after the War and through their acquaintance I first came into contact with the tradition of the Vienna Circle. To their conversation .too lowe much as regards the clarification of my own views, even if in the end these took quite a different turn in many essentials. At this point my gratitude goes first of all to Mrs. Lia J uhos for the gen erous help she has given me and the editors of the Vienna Circle collection in selecting the contents of this volume. Next, we owe a special debt to Dr. Paul Foulkes for his splendid translation of the text. Finally, I wish to thank Dr. Veit Pittioni for his constant assistance. As Juhos' last student, he was thoro).lghly familiar with his supervisor's mode of thought and has significantly furthered the assembly and execution of this book.

The decision to undertake this volume was made in 1971 at Lake Como during the Varenna summer school ofthe Italian Physical Society, where Professor Leon Rosenfeld was lecturing on the history of quantum theory. We had long been struck by the unique blend of epistemological, histori cal and social concerns in his work on the foundations and development of physics, and decided to approach him there with the idea of publishing a collection of his papers. He responded enthusiastically, and agreed to help us select the papers; furthermore, he also agreed to write a lengthy introduction and to comment separately on those papers that he felt needed critical re-evaluation in the light of his current views. For he was still vigorously engaged in both theoretical investigations of, and critical not reflections on the foundations of theoretical physics. We certainly did conceive of the volume as a memorial to a 'living saint', but rather more practically, as a useful tool to place in the hands of fellow workers and students engaged in wrestling with these difficult problems. All too sadly, fate has added a memorial aspect to our labors. We agreed that in order to make this book most useful for the con temporary community of physicists and philosophers, we should trans late all non-English items into English.

Selections from the work of an influential contributor to the methodology of the social sciences. He treats: measurement, experimental design, epistemology, and sociology of science each section introduced by the editor, Samuel Overman. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The thirty-one papers collected in this volume represent most of the arti cles that I have published in the philosophy of science and related founda tional areas of science since 1970. The present volume is a natural succes sor to Studies in the Methodology and Foundations of Science, a collection of my articles published in 1969 by Reidel (now a part of Kluwer). The articles are arranged under five main headings. Part I contains six articles on general methodology. The topics range from formal methods to the plurality of science. Part II contains six articles on causality and explanation. The emphasis is almost entirely on probabilistic approaches. Part III contains six articles on probability and measurement. The impor tance of representation theorems for both probability and measurement is stressed. Part IV contains five articles on the foundations of physics. The first three articles are concerned with action at a distance and space and time, the last two with quantum mechanics. Part V contains eight articles on the foundations of psychology. This is the longest part and the articles reflect my continuing strong interest in the nature of learning and perception. Within each part the articles are arranged chronologically. I turn now to a more detailed overview of the content. The first article of Part I concerns the role of formal methods in the philosophy of science. Here I discuss what is the new role for formal methods now that the imperialism of logical positivism has disappeared.

In selecting the papers for this volume I have excluded all physics papers proper. I have further omitted all book rev.iews. Instead, I have included two papers not published previously; they are marked by an asterisk (*) in the table of contents. Since many of the papers were occasioned by Symposia or similar gatherings their chronological order is rather accidental. Hence I have tried to group the papers thematically into four parts. Within each part the order of sequence is from the more general to the more special, or from a more popular to a more technical treatment. The same principle has been applied to the sequential order of the parts. The foundational papers on quantum mechanics have been arranged in a somewhat dif ferent manner. Chapters XVI-XIX are concerned with the logic of complementarity while in Chapters XX-XXII a more radical recon ceptualization is carried out. Two of the older papers (Chapters VI and VIII) have been revised to bring them more into line with present terminology. Other papers have been corrected by additions and omissions. Additions are marked by square brackets [ ], while double square brackets [[ II signify omis sions or parts to be omitted. Hence [[A]] [B] means that 'A' should be replaced by 'B'. The heading of one paper (Chapter XX) has been changed to make it more descriptive.

The twenty-three papers collected in tbis volume represent an important part of my published work up to the date of this volume. I have not arranged the paper chronologically, but under four main headings. Part I contains five papers on methodology concerned with models and measurement in the sciences. This part also contains the first paper I published, 'A Set of Independent Axioms for Extensive Quantities', in Portugaliae Mathematica in 1951. Part 11 also is concerned with methodology and ineludes six papers on probability and utility. It is not always easy to separate papers on probability and utility from papers on measurement, because of the elose connection between the two subjects, but Artieles 6 and 8, even though they have elose relations to measurement, seem more properly to belong in Part 11, because they are concerned with substantive questions about probability and utility. The last two parts are concerned with the foundations of physics and the foundations of psychology. I have used the term foundations rather than philosophy, because the papers are mainly concerned with specific axiomatic formulations for particular parts of physics or of psychology, and it seems to me that the termfoundations more appropriately describes such constructive axiomatic ventures. Part 111 contains four papers on the foundations of physics. The first paper deals with foundations of special relativity and the last three with the role ofprobability in quantum mechanics.