The Concept of Reality

Abstract

In our survey of Eddington’s philosophical interpretation of the physical sciences, we have found two fundamental strands at work, the operational-phenomenalist trend and the causal theory’s realist assumptions. Men like Dingle have argued that these two points of view are antithetical, that they cannot be brought together, that, in fact, the presence of the latter indicates that Eddington just did not succeed in throwing off all vestiges of the older absolute position. The “inscrutable ‘conditions of the world’” of his The Mathematical Theory of Relativity hung, Dingle protested, “like the Old Man of the Sea round the neck of his thought, contributing nothing and serving only to retard its progress and obscure results which, expressed simply and directly in terms of the essential measurements alone, might have commanded understanding and acceptance.”¹ What Dingle considered a constriction to the full development of Eddington’s thought was, however, a conscious part of Eddington’s system. The causal theory of perception and the doctrine of structure were integral aspects of his interpretation of the sciences introduced to account for specific problems of physics and epistemology which the operationalist refuses to consider.