Reichenbach on causality in 1923: Scientific inference,coordination, and confirmation

In The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920b), Reichenbach developed an original account of cognition as coordination of formal structures to empirical ones. One of the most salient features of this account is that it is explicitly not a top-down type of coordination, and in fact it is crucially “directed” by the empirical side. Reichenbach called this feature “the mutuality of coordination” but, in that work, did not elaborate sufficiently on how this is supposed to work. In a paper that he wrote less than two years afterwards (but that he published only in 1932), “The Principle of Causality and the Possibility of its Empirical Confirmation” (1923/1932), he described what seems to be a model for this idea, now within an analysis of causality that results in an account of scientific inference. Recent reassessments of his early proposal do not seem to capture the extent of Reichenbach's original worries. The present paper analyses Reichenbach's early account and suggests a new way to look at his early work. According to it, we perform measurements, individuate parameters, collect and analyse data, by using a “constructive” approach, such as the one with which we formulate and test hypotheses, which paradigmatically requires some simplicity assumptions. Reichenbach's attempt to account for all these aspects in 1923 was obviously limited and naive in many ways, but it shows that, in his view, there were multiple ways in which the idea of “constitution” is embodied in scientific practice.     

Intensions, belief and science: Kuhn’s early philosophical outlook (1940-1945)

Between 1940 and 1945, while still a student of theoretical physics and without any contact with the history of science, Thomas S. Kuhn developed a general outline of a theory of the role of belief in science. This theory was well rooted in the philosophical tradition of Emerson Hall, Harvard, and particularly in H. M. Sheffer’s and C. I. Lewis’s logico-philosophical works—Kuhn was, actually, a graduate student of the former in 1945. In this paper I reconstruct the development of that general outline after Kuhn’s first years at Harvard. I examine his works on moral and aesthetic issues—where he displayed an already ‘anti-Whig’ stance concerning historiography—as well as his first ‘Humean’ approach to science and realism, where his earliest concern with belief is evident. Then I scrutinise his graduate work to show how his first account of the role of belief was developed. The main aim of this paper is to show that the history of science illustrated for Kuhn the epistemic role and effects of belief he had already been theorising about since around 1941.     

Picturing the moon: Hevelius’s and Riccioli’s visual debate

This article investigates the maps of the moon produced in the mid-seventeenth century by Jesuit Giambattista Riccioli (1598-1671) and Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), whose cartographic projects competed for widespread acceptance. Although Hevelius’s Selenographia (1647) was applauded for its many detailed, self-engraved pictures of the moon, his cartography and proposed nomenclature were supplanted by Riccioli’s as offered in Almagestum novum (1651), in spite of the latter’s simplistic pictures and promotion of geocentric cosmology. Exploring this paradox through pictorial analysis, three types of images common to both Selenographia and Almagestum novum are compared, employing an analytical tool developed by Svetlana Alpers in The art of describing (1983). A focus on this debate exposes the tensions evoked by new technologies of vision and competing cultures of visual epistemology in seventeenth-century astronomy. As both selenographers grappled with questions about the role of representation and what kinds of knowledge could be generated visually, the successes and failures of their competing projects present implications for the course of visual astronomy, as well as for our understanding of the use of ‘visual technologies’ in a period of controversy.     

Reconsidering the Fresnel–Maxwell theory shift: how the realist can have her cake and EAT it too

This paper takes another look at a case study which has featured prominently in a variety of arguments for rival realist positions. After critically reviewing the previous commentaries of the theory shift that took place in the transition from Fresnel’s ether to Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of optics, it will defend a slightly different reading of this historical case study. Central to this task is the notion of explanatory approximate truth, a concept which must be carefully analysed to begin with. With this notion properly understood, it will be finally argued, the popular Fresnel–Maxwell case study points towards a novel formulation of scientific realism.     

Carl du Prel (1839–1899): explorer of dreams, the soul, and the cosmos

Nineteenth-century spiritism was a blend of religious elements, the philosophy of mind, science and popular science and contacts with extraterrestrials were a commonplace phenomenon during spiritistic séances. Using the example of Carl du Prel (1839–1899) I show how his comprehensive mystic philosophy originated in a theory of extraterrestrial life. Carl du Prel used a Darwinian and monistic framework, theories of the unconscious and a Neo-Kantian epistemology to formulate a philosophy of astronomy and extraterrestrial life. He claimed that the mechanism of Darwinian selection is responsible for the distribution of stars and the orbits of the planets. In his speculations on the nature of extraterrestrial life he used the concept of organ projection to argue that technical solutions on earth will be realized organically on other planets and claimed that superior extraterrestrials have quantitatively and qualitatively different senses and thus different forms of intuition. A comparison with Camille Flammarion, spiritist and populariser of astronomy, demonstrates the contextual complexities of spiritism. In contrast to du Prel’s sober Neo-Kantian philosophical speculations, Flammarion was a late proponent of a French esoteric tradition that was rooted in romantic socialism, painted grand cosmological vistas and emphasized reincarnation. I put forward the hypothesis that current discourses on extraterrestrial life are affected by the spiritist tradition mainly through the ‘Golden Age’ science fiction literature of the 1940s and 50s and its successors. However, neither Carl du Prel nor Camille Flammarion contributed significantly to this tradition, which is mainly shaped by the psychical research of J. B. Rhine.