- Hardcover: 162 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press (Dec 1966)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0520010590
- ISBN-13: 978-0520010598
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,332,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
The building of a relativistic epistemology
30 Oct 1997
Format:Hardcover
In "The theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge"--logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach's first book--an attempt is made to rescue philosophy from the mistakes made by tying our best theories of knowledge too closely with pre-Einsteinian physics. The book was written in 1920, when the special and general theories of relativity were beginning their overthrow of classical ideas and this is one of the first attempts to model a theory of knowledge on the mathematical machinery of relativity.
Reichenbach's project is to first show that the epistemological notions underlying the theory of relativity are not consistent with any of the three major theories of knowledge popular at the time: the empiricism of the early positivists, the conventionalism of Henri Poincare (a view he would later embrace), and especially the apriorism of Kant and the Neo-Kantians of his time. Once this has been shown, Reichenbach creates a new epistemology which takes what Reichenbach sees as the attractive portions of each. He argues that Kant is correct in his claim that there must be some contribution to knowledge in order to structure our raw impressions into meaningful objects and relations. But that he is wrong to grant the structuring principles, the so-called a priori, the status of absolute truth. Instead the structure they produce must be empirically justified. In this he agrees with the positivists, but criticizes them for overlooking the theory-ladenness of observation that was pointed out by Kant. Finally he argues that often times theory and observation will underdetermine the applicability of a theory. In such a case there will be arbitrary aspects inplicit in an applied scienific theory. This arbitrariness corroborates Poincare to some extent, but Reichenbach argues that the degree to which Poincare takes his characterization of science as conventional is problematic. Poincare's claim that geometry is conventional, for example, is false according to Reichenbach. Within a reference frame, geometry is completely fixed and there is no guarantee that for a given geometry there will be a frame which will entail it. This is, of course, a far different arguement than one finds in his famous "Philosophy of Space and Time" eight years later.
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