Abstract
In those annals of history which record the noble espousal of lost causes, the name of Ernst Mach is often linked with the opposition to atomic and molecular theories, along with such figures as Ostwald, Stallo, and Duhem. And rightly so, for Mach’s writings over a fifty-year period from 18661 until 1916 reveal an extreme suspicion of, bordering often on a hostility to, most of the atomistic theories of that period. Moreover, the running dispute between Mach and Boltzmann and later between Mach and Planck centered squarely on the efficacy of atomic and molecular approaches to the exploration of natural phenomena. But though the fact of Mach’s opposition to atomic/molecular theories is well known and widely cited, Mach’s specific argumentative strategies against such theories have been less fully explored and understood. Still less well documented is the relation of Mach’s stand on atomism to his other work in philosophy, especially in the area of the logic and epistemology of science. Finally, the relation of Mach’s critique of atomism to the views of his scientific and philosophical contemporaries is almost completely unexplored terrain.
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Notes
all of it ambiguous, that suggests that until the early 1860s Mach was a partisan of atomic and molecular hypotheses. My own belief is that Mach held serious reservations about atomism from the beginning of his scientific career, but that point requires much more elaboration than I can give it here. Useful discussions of Mach’s early work can be found in S. Brush, `Mach and Atomism’, Synthese 18 (1968), 192–215. Virtually all the claims of this particular paper concern Mach’s views from about 1863 onward.
For examples of this approach to Mach, see J. Blackmore, Ernst Mach (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 321 ff., and F. Seaman, `Mach’s Rejection of Atomism’, J. H. I. 29 (1968), 389–93, both of whom see Mach’s `phenomenalism’ as the source of, and the motivation for, his rejection of atomism.
It should be pointed out that Mach had written a treatise on certain problems in psychophysics and the problem or perception in the early 1860s. However, given that Mach was very much under the influence of Fechner at this time, and given that Mach was to repudiate Fechner’s views in the Analysis of Sensations, it is most unlikely that Mach in the 1860s adhered to anything like the sensationalism of that later work. (Unfortunately, the manuscript of his early treatise on psychophysics does not seem to be extant.)
Mach stresses this point often himself. See, for instance, E. Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Jena, 1886); Eng. trans., The Analysis of Sensations, (Chicago, 1914), p. 311. Again in E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics, 6th ed. (LaSalle, Ill., 1960), Mach argues that although atoms “cannot be perceived by the senses”, that alone does not differentiate them from other objects since “all substances ... are things of thought” (p. 589). For yet another variant on this theme, see Mach’s 1892 article in The Monist, where he argues that notions as divergent as “the law of refraction, caloric, electricity, light-waves, molecules, atoms and energy all and in the same way must be regarded as mere helps or expedients to facilitate our view of things” (p. 202). Even Mach’s persistent opponent, Ludwig Boltzmann, points out that Mach is aware that a phenomenalistic epistemology cannot differentiate between atomistic conceptions and physical-thing conceptions, so far as their epistemic well-foundedness is concerned. See L. Boltzmann, Populäre Schriften, (Leipzig, 1905), p. 142.
I wish to make clear that, in denying that Mach’s sensationalist epistemology had much to do with his stand on the cogency of atomic/molecular theorizing, I am not asserting a general claim about the independence of Mach’s philosophy of science from his sensationalism. There are numerous points of contact between the two which deserve careful exploration. Equally, I am not asserting that all of Mach’s reasons for opposing atomic/molecular modes of explanation were independent of his sensationalism, for that claim, too, would be misleading. My thesis, rather, is that the bulk of Mach’s stated reasons for opposing such theories are independent of his theory of perception and of epistemic ‘elements’.
See E. Hiebert, ‘The Genesis of Mach’s Early Views on Atomism’, in R. Cohen and R. Seeger (eds.), Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher (Dordrecht, 1970), pp. 79–106.
Ibid., p. 95.
See especially the section below dealing with Mach’s specific criticisms of atomism.
See Akademische Behörden, Personalstannd and Ordnung der offentlichen Vorlesungen an der k. k. Karl-Franzens-Universität zu Gratz, Graz, 1863–66. Swoboda’s study is entitled, `The Thought and Works of the Young Ernst Mach and the Antecedents to his Philosophy’, Ph.D., dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1973.
E. Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum (Leipzig, 1905), p. vii. I have used the 1917 edition.
Although Mach does not often explicitly identify himself as a `positivist’, his writings are strongly positivistic in tone and content, and he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as one of the leading exponents of positivism. Toward the end of his life, he did concede that he was a “positivist”. See E. Mach, Die Leitgedanken (Leipzig, 1919), p. 15.
Comte, for instance, often spoke of “l’introduction, strictement indispensable, des hypothèses en philosophie naturelle” (A. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. [Paris, 1830–42] , 2: 434).
Thus, Comte writes: “Car, si d’un côté, tout théorie positive doit nécessairment être fondée sur les observations, il est également sensible, d’un autre côté, que, pour se livrer à l’observation, notre esprit a besoin d’une théorie quelconque” (Cours de philosophie positive, 1: 8–9).
Mach, The Science of Mechanics, p. 161.
For a more detailed discussion of Comte’s views, see Chapter 9.
E. Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, 5th ed. (LaSalle, Ill., 1943), p. 248.
Here again, it is important to stress the chronology. In Mach’s very early scientific writings, he is himself a reductionist, arguing for the reduction of all of physics to “applied mechanics” (E. Mach, Compendium der Physik für Mediciner [Vienna, 1863], p. 55); for the reduction of physiology to “applied physics,” ibid., p. 1; and elsewhere, for the reduction of chemistry and psychology to mechanics. This is a view, and a program, that Mach repudiated during the mid-1860s and that he argued against for the rest of his life. We do not yet have any satisfactory account of this important shift in Mach’s thought.
See especially J. Blackmore, Ernst Mach; J. Bradley, Mach’s Philosophy of Science (London, 1971); S. Brush, ‘Mach and Atomism’; G. Buchdahl, ’Sources of Scepticism in Atomic Theory’, B. J. P. S. 10 (1960), 120–34; E. Hiebert, ’The Genesis of Mach’s Early Views on Atomism’, M. J. Nye, Molecular Reality (New York, 1972); and F. Seaman, ‘Mach’s Rejection of Atomism’.
For reasons that have never been clear to me, most of Mach’s recent commentators have assumed that his doctrine that “science is description” precluded him from recognizing that there is any predictive element in science or that science can go beyond the known data. Harold Jeffreys, for instance, writes that “Mach missed the point that to describe an observation that has not been made yet is not the sanie thing as to describe one that has been made; consequently he missed the whole problem of induction” (Scientific Inference [Cambridge, 1957] , p. 15). It is, I suspect, Jeffreys and others like him, such as Braithwaite (R. Braithwaite, Scientific explanation, [Cambridge, 1953 ] , p. 348), who miss Mach’s point. In stressing the view that the aim of science is description, Mach is contrasting it not with prediction but rather with explanation (in the sense of identifying the underlying metaphysical causes of things). Mach stresses time and again the extent to which theories must anticipate new data, the degree to which every scientific hypothesis goes beyond a mere description of the known facts. One has only to glance at a work such as Erkenntnis und Irrtum to see the extent to which Mach did recognize several vital epistemic differences between descriptions of known facts and predictions of unknown ones and, correlatively, the extent to which he attempts to face up to the problem of induction in its various guises.
E. Mach, History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy, trans. P. Jourdain, (Chicago, 1941), p. 57.
Ibid.
As he pointed out in Wärmelehre: “Der heuristische and didaktische Werth der Atomistik ... soll keineswegs in Abrede werden” (E. Mach, Die Principien der Wärmelehre, Leipzig, 1896], p. 430n).
Speaking of Boltzmann’s use of the atomic theory, Mach notes that “Der Forscher darf nicht nur, sondern soll alle Mittel verwenden, welche ihm helfen können” (ibid.).
E. Mach, `Some Questions of Psycho-physics’, Monist 1 (1890), 393 ff., 396.
Mach explicitly points out in Wärmelehre that “it should be emphasized that an hypothesis can have great heuristic value as a working hypothesis, and at the same time be of very dubious epistemological value” (Die Principien der Wärmelehre, p. 430 n).
E. Mach, `Some Questions of Psycho-physics’.
The passage is probably worth quoting in full: “When a geometer wishes to understand the form of a curve, he first resolves it into small rectilinear elements. In doing this, however, he is fully aware that these elements are only provisional and arbitrary devices for comprehending in parts what he cannot comprehend as a whole. When the law of the curve is found he no longer thinks of the elements. Similarly, it would not become physical science to see in its self-created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena ... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena, like the functions of mathematics. Gradually, however, as the intellect, by contact with its subject matter, grows in discipline, physical science will give up its mosaic play with stones and will seek out the boundaries and forms of the bed in which the living stream of phenomena flows” (E. Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, 5th ed. [LaSalle, Bl., 1943], pp. 206–7).
Mach, The Science of Mechanics, p. 596.
Ibid., p. 610.
Ibid.
Ibid.
E. Mach, History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy, p. 5.
Mach, Erkenntnis and Irrtum, p. 414.
See, for instance, the discussion quoted in S. Suvorov, `Einstein’s Philosophical Views and Their Relation to His Physical Opinions’, Soviet Physics Uspekhi 8 (1966), 578609.
Quoted in G. Buchdahl, `Sources of Scepticism in Atomic Theory’.
A. Kekulé, `On Some Points of Chemical Philosophy’, Laboratory 1 (1867), 304.
A. Williamson, `On the Atomic Theory’, Jour. Chem. Soc. 22 (1869), 328.
E. Mills, `On Statistical and Dynamical Ideas on the Atomic Theory’, Phil. Mag., 8th ser., 42 (1871), 112–29.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid., p. 129.
M. Faraday, `Speculation Touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter’, Phil. Mag., Ser. 3,24 (1844): 136.
C. Wright, Chemical News 24 (1874), 74–5.
As Brock has pointed out, in W. Brock (ed.), The Atomic Debates (Leicester, 1967), pp. 145 ff., many of the most vocal members of the anti-atomist camp in the 1850s and 1860s were followers of Comte, including Berthelot, Wyrouboff, and Naquet.
Boltzmann,Populäre Schriften, p. 155.
C. A. Wurtz, La théorie atomique (Paris, 1879), p. 2.
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Laudan, L. (1981). Ernst Mach’s Opposition to Atomism. In: Science and Hypothesis. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7288-0_13
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