Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition). Thomas J. Hickey
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Thus Einstein for example changed the meanings of such terms as “space” and “time”, which occur in both the Newtonian and relativity theories. And Heisenberg changed the meanings of the terms “wave” and “particle”. Feyerabend calls the semantical change due to the relative nature of semantics, “meaning variance”.
Thesis II: Empirical underdetermination.
Empirical underdetermination refers to the limited ability of the semantics of language at any given time to signify reality.
Measurement error and conceptual vagueness, which can be reduced indefinitely but never completely, eliminated, exemplify the omnipresent and ever-present empirical underdetermination of language that produces observational ambiguity and theoretical pluralism. Einstein recognized that a plurality of alternative but empirically adequate theories could be consistent with the same observational description, a situation that in his autobiography he called “an embarrassment of riches”.
Additional context including law statements in improved test-design language contributes additional semantics to the observational description in the test designs, thus reducing while never completely eliminating empirical underdetermination. In his Word and Object Quine introduced the phrase “empirical underdetermination”, and wrote that the positivists’ theoretical terms are merely more empirically underdetermined than terms they called observation terms. Thus the types of terms are not qualitatively different.
Thesis III: Ontological relativity.
In his discussions about Einstein’s special theory of relativity in Physics and Philosophy and in Across the Frontiers Heisenberg describes the “decisive step” in the development of special relativity. That step was Einstein’s rejection of 1902 Nobel-laureate Hendrik Lorentz’s distinction between “apparent time” and “actual time” in the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz took the Newtonian concepts to describe real space and time. In his relativity theory Einstein took Lorentz’s “apparent time” as physically real time, while altogether rejecting the Newtonian concept of absolute time as real time. In other words the “decisive step” in Einstein’s special theory of relativity consisted of Einstein’s taking the relativity theory realistically, thus letting his relativity theory characterize the physically real, i.e., physical ontology.
Also in “History of Quantum Theory” in his Physics and Philosophy Heisenberg describes his imitation of Einstein in his discovery experience for quantum theory. There he states that his thinking about the uncertainty relations consisted of turning around a question. Instead of asking himself how one can express in the Newtonian mathematical scheme a given experimental situation, he asked whether only such experimental situations can arise in nature as can be described in the formalism of his quantum mechanics. The new question is an ontological question with the answer supplied by his quantum theory.
Again in “Remarks on the Origin of the Relations of Uncertainty” in The Uncertainty Principle and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics Heisenberg explicitly states that a Newtonian path of the electron in the cloud chamber does not exist. And still again in “The Development of the Interpretation of the Quantum Theory” in 1945 Nobel-laureate Wolfgang Pauli’s Niels Bohr and the Development of Physics, Heisenberg says that he inverted the question of how to pass from an experimentally given situation to its mathematical representation. There he concludes that only those states that can be represented as vectors in Hilbert space can exist in nature and be realized experimentally. And he immediately adds that this conclusion has its prototype in Einstein’s special theory of relativity, when Einstein had removed the difficulties of electrodynamics by saying that the apparent time of the Lorentz transformation is real time.
Like Heisenberg in 1926, the contemporary pragmatist philosophers let the scientist rather than the philosopher decide ontological questions. And the scientist decides on the basis of empirical adequacy demonstrated in his empirically tested explanations. Many years later in his Ontological Relativity Quine called this thesis “ontological relativity”, as it is known today.
Ontological relativity did not begin with Heisenberg much less with Quine. Copernicus and Galileo practiced it when they both interpreted heliocentrism realistically thus accepting the ontology it describes – to the fateful chagrin of Pope Urban VIII. Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation still prevails in physics today. But should future superior test designs and experiments result in falsification of his Copenhagen interpretation, then physicists’ practice of ontological relativity would make a newer empirically more adequate theory define the prevailing ontology in future microphysics.
The contemporary pragmatist concepts of the four functional topics are summarized as follows:
Aim of science:
The successful outcome of basic-science research is explanations made by developing theories that satisfy empirical tests, theories that are thereby made scientific laws that function in scientific explanations.
Wherever possible the explanation should enable prediction of either future events or evidence of past events. And it is beneficial furthermore for the explanation to enable control of explained nonlinguistic reality by applied science such as new engineering technologies, new medical therapies and new social policies, where success makes pragmatism blatantly self-evident.
Discovery:
Discovery is the construction of new and empirically more adequate theories.
Contemporary pragmatism is consistent with computerized discovery systems, which aim to proceduralize and mechanize new theory construction, in order to advance contemporary science.
In the “Introduction” to his magisterial Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958), Yale University philosopher of science Norwood Russell Hanson wrote that earlier philosophers of science like the positivists had mistakenly regarded as paradigms of inquiry finished systems like Newton’s planetary mechanics instead of the unsettled, dynamic research sciences like contemporary microphysics. Hanson explains that the finished systems are no longer research sciences, although they were at one time. And he states that distinctions applying to the finished systems ought to be suspect when transferred to research disciplines, and that such transferred distinctions afford an artificial account of the activities in which Kepler, Galileo and Newton were actually engaged. He thus maintains that ideas such as “theory”, “hypothesis”, “law”, “causality” and “principle” if drawn from what he calls the finished “catalogue-sciences” found in undergraduate textbooks will ill prepare one for understanding research-science.
Both romantics and positivists define “theory” semantically, while contemporary pragmatists define “theory” pragmatically, i.e., by its function in basic research.
Contemporary pragmatists define both theory and observation language pragmatically instead of semantically. The pragmatics of both types of language is empirical testing.
Theories are universally quantified statements that are proposed for testing.
Test-designs are universally quantified statements that are presumed for testing, to identify the subject of the test and to describe procedures for execution of the test, and they include universal statements that are semantical rules for the test-outcome statements that are asserted when the test outcome is produced and known.
The semantics of newly constructed theories reveal new perspectives and ontologies.
Scientific laws are former theories that have been tested with nonfalsifying test outcomes.
Observation language is particularly quantified test-design and test-outcome statements with their semantics defined in the universally quantified test-design language.
Unlike positivists, pragmatists do not recognize any natural observation semantics. For believers in a theory, the theory language may also contribute to the observational semantics, but that semantical contribution cannot operate