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Abstraction and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

L. S. Stebbing M.A.
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The man in the street to-day is aware that recent developments in the physical sciences have necessitated a fundamental revision of the concepts of physics; he finds that Einstein is no less upsetting to his ideas than was Copernicus to those of his own time or than Darwin was to Bishop Wilberforce. The plain man who has “ philosophical leanings ” is aware that questions previously regarded as metaphysical—and about which philosophers have written much that is unintelligible—are now recognized as falling within the scope of physics. Every reader of this Journal is aware that the criticism to which the main concepts of physics—space, time, matter—have been subjected is so fundamental that it is no longer possible tosay that there are material bodies in space, which have events happening to them at a given time. We must substitute the conception of a fourfold continuum within which space, time and matter are inextricably involved. Finally, we are told that this new way of regarding the classical trinity suggests the consequence that we know nothing about the “ inner nature ” of the terms with which we deal, we can make no assertions as to the ultimate nature of that to which they may refer. In this respect the prevailing temper of the present-day scientist is to be contrasted with the cocksureness of most nineteenth-century physicists l who, even if they did not go so far as to say “ we know what matter is,” at least suggested that only the metaphysician had, or could have, any doubts as to its nature and reality^

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Type
Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 5 , January 1927 , pp. 28 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1927

References

page 28 Note 1 The term “ nineteenth-century physicist ” is possibly somewhat misleading. It is intended to indicate mainly Lord Kelvin, Tait, Tyndall and their disciples. It seems to me that the attitude of Maxwell was in important respects different from that of his contemporaries.

page 28 Note 2 Treatise on Natural Philosophy, vol. i, part i (ed. 1879), § 207.Google Scholar

page 29 Note 1 The Properties of Matter, § xx.

page 29 Note 2 Recent Advances in Physical Science, 1876, p. 14.

page 29 Note 3 Treatise on Natural Philosophy, § 216.

page 29 Note 4 Ibid., p. viii.

page 29 Note 5 Cf. Tait, : “ Energy, like matter, has been experimentally proved to be indestructible and uncreatable by man. It exists, therefore, altogether independently of human senses and human reason, though it is known to man solely by their aid.” (Properties of Matter, § 7; cf. also §§ 91–97.)Google Scholar

page 32 Note 1 Whitehead, , Mathematical Concepts of the Material World. Philosophical Transactions, vol. 205, A, p. 525.Google Scholar

page 32 Note 2 Science and the Modern World, p. 47.

page 32 Note 3 Ibid., p. 72,

page 33 Note 1 Cf. Keynes, J. M., Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 39.Google Scholar

page 34 Note 1 Loc. cit., p. 12.

page 35 Note 1 Hence, Poincare’s phrase “ Normal objectivity,” and Planck’s dictum, “ The real is the measurable.”

page 35 Note 2 Science, Religion and Reality, p. 196; cf. p. 193.

page 36 Note 1 The Concept of Nature, p. 163. Uniformity and Contingency, p. 9.

page 36 Note 2 Cf. Science and the Modern World, p. 238.

page 37 Note 1 From this standpoint the difference of past and future is a local difference; hence, apart from etymological objections, the scientist can be said to “predict the past.”

page 37 Note 2 See p. 32 above.

page 38 Note 1 The Concept of Nature, p. 19.