Abstract
It has been said of Sir Arthur Eddington, whose philosophy of science included many Kantian a priori considerations, that he had been very nearsighted all his life. At a late age he was fitted for spectacles and for the first time began really to take in the visual data. The implications of this uncharitable gossip are of course that the a priori elements of Eddington’s philosophy were primarily the result of myopia and only secondarily the result of methodological and scientific considerations.
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Notes
- 1.
Ames’s distorted room experiments are described in Bartley (1958, 216ff).
- 2.
“The Ames demonstrations … seem most plausibly accounted for by reference to the observer’s past experience” (Dember 1960, 267).
- 3.
By the time the manuscript reached its typed form, this word appeared as “seductive.” Indeed, it may be that “seductive argument” was what Hanson intended here! –WCH.
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Lund, M.D. (2018). Spectacles Behind the Eyes. In: Lund, M.D. (eds) Perception and Discovery. Synthese Library, vol 389. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69745-1_9
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