Blog Ekkehard Friebe

Nachstehend bringe ich einen Auszug aus der neuen Website von Philosophie-Professor Dr. Mogens True Wegener. Die URL hierzu erhielt ich vor wenigen Tagen von Prof. Wegener per E-Mail zugesandt.

Zitat:

IDEAS OF RELATIVITY: INTERPRETATIONS IN CONFLICT
The PIRT-Conferences 1988-1998, PIRT-Proc. 1998, Imperial College London
Mogens True Wegener, emeritus professor of philosophy, Aarhus University, Danmark

As one of the rather few philosophers attending the biennial conferences on the Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory from their start in 1988 until 1998, ten years later, I would like to take this opportunity to assess the import of the various contributions offered by these conferences from a philosophical point of view, in order to give some clues as regards the perspectives of future progress in this field of physics. Throughout the past decade all our conferences have been sponsored by the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

For that reason it may not seem imposterous for a philosopher to assume this task. Dr Duffy, the glorious initiator and excellent secretary of these conferences, has also chosen their title and written the text of their programme, from which I quote: „Contributors should note that the starting point of the conference programme is the acceptance of the accuracy and excellence of Relativity Theory which provides the framework for the discussion.

The questions raised are directed towards examining the philosophical, historical and methodological aspects of the various interpretations of the formal structure, and the implications which these several interpretations have for physical theories“. No one, however, could rightly accuse Dr Duffy for having exerted the harsh strictures of blind orthodoxy and I, for one, am gratified that the actual course of these conferences has not shown any resemblance to what one might have feared from a very rigorous implementation of the passage just quoted. In fact, our little society has rather witnessed „the flowering of a thousand flowers“, in contrast to those much larger societies which have been marred by the crippling influence of dogmatism. But not everything is well in our little garden, part of the great field of natural science.

Relativity is a topic in mathematical physics. I remember from a conversation with a collegue from the mathematics department at our university, how one of his casual remarks struck me with surprise. Mathematical physics, he told me, is an altogether different subject depending on whether it is practised by a mathematician or by a physicist. Indeed, mathematicians and physicists constitute two different camps within the field of mathematical physics; each camp having developed its own scientific journals and organizations, their mutual communication and intercourse is next to nill. Metaphorically, the two camps are separated by a huge distance covering a vast desert of wasteland too hostile to the passage of visitors. This division into two camps has its counterpart in a cleavage that threatens to split our own society into sections that do not communicate. So their adherents sometimes behave like sectarians.

One could say that such conflict of interpretations is the price we have to pay for our freedom of thought. In a way I believe that this is right – but it is a philosopher’s task to work for unification wherever unity is possible, and I do not see any reason for giving up in advance.

The division, alluded to by my collegue, between mathematicians and physicists, I see repeated in our own forum as the cleavage between two divergent attitudes to issues of relativity theory.

These attitudes, exposed as ideal types, I shall henceforth characterize as naïve formalism and naïve realism, respectively. So I put up two ideal types as virtual targets in order to shoot them down by intellectual criticism. By treating the two attitudes as radical extremes, I hope that I can attack them freely without running the risk of hurting anybody personally.

Fortunately, the two ideal types rarely manifest themselves historically in a pure form; but the divergency of trends is clear, although their statistics is a far cry from equilibrium. Correspondingly we find a marked tendency towards the preponderance of realists among the participants in our meetings which may be due to the presence of the predicate ‚physical‘ in the title given to them.

Now attitudes towards science are not in themselves scientific. Neither can arguments advanced in support of such attitudes justly be called scientific, although their proponents, of course, attempt to underpin them by reference to what they believe is well established science.

What unifies the two attitudes just mentioned as opposite poles within a single field of tension is their common quest for an ultimate explanation, meaning an explanation of our sensible experiences that has its foundation in „the hidden depths“ of Nature. So they remain on a par as regards their philosophical urge towards ontology, or metaphysics. What differentiates them is the sort of explanation suggested:

A) In the case of naïve formalism the explanation consists of a reference to the immanence in Nature of eternal forms, mathematical or geometrical. Thus naïve formalism is pure idealism, the most vulgar kind of Platonism, or Pythagoreanism.

B) In the case of naïve realism the explanation involves the claim that Nature in itself consists of matter-in-motion, of non-sensible fields, or of a substance, or substratum, termed the aether.

Thus understood, naïve realism may derive from the Ionic search for a material principle, from the atomism of Democritus, from the aether-theory of Descartes, or from some other source.

Arché being the Greek word for principle of origin, we may describe naïve realism as archaic.

As the formalists often take over the jargon of realism, speaking of „curved spacetime“, or the „structure of pure emptiness“, as ultimate realities, the issues sometimes get somewhat blurred.

So instead of speaking of realism in contrast to formalism I might have spoken of materialism, or substantialism. In that case I would not have needed the predicate ’naïve‘ since, today, all traditional kinds of materialism, or substantialism, are certainly naïve. But what I here brand as naïveté is purely philosophical, viz. a peculiar kind of intellectual immaturity that, nevertheless, remains compatible with the highest degree of scientific sophistication and ingenuity.

(Zitatende)

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