Abstract
This paper has a twofold aim. On the one hand, it explores the extent to which Mach was inspired by Kant’s approach to philosophical inquiry and tried to further elaborate it through his historico-critical method for enlightening scientific knowledge claims. On the other hand, it argues that the focus on the situated character of these claims that is implied in Mach’s epistemology makes it possible to compare his view to recent attempts to defend a perspectival realist account of scientific knowledge, thus revealing the relevance of Mach’s own approach as a methodology in the philosophy of science.
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Notes
Erwin Hiebert (1970, 194), e.g., remarked that “the specific questions Mach raised about science were essentially of a philosophical nature. Although he was never at ease with ‘philosophy’ he was not at all averse to the examination of philosophical questions provided that such activity implied nothing more than ‘scientific epistemology’, i.e., erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchungen”. Similarly, Richard von Mises (1987, 186) observed that Mach in fact “engaged in philosophical activities, at least if we regard it as the task of a philosophy to clarify statements made in daily life or in science, to analyse their sense, and to investigate their connections”. He further maintained that “there is hardly a physicist today whose whole half-conscious, half-unconscious attitude towards the fundamental questions of his science has not been determined by Mach’s questioning of dogmas and his concrete elucidations of the fundamental concepts of physics” (1987, 189).
Max Plank concluded his attack against Mach’s epistemology with the following sentence: “In the serene trust in the power of the Word, which for over nineteen hundred years has taught us the ultimate indubitable sign of how to distinguish true from false prophets: By their fruits shall ye know them!” (Blackmore 1992, 132).
In his communication to the 2016 Centenary Conference on Ernst Mach held by the Institut Wiener Kreis, Don Howard argued that the reference to a historico-critical approach in the title of Mach’s works may be a response to the nineteenth-century tradition of Biblical criticism and the reception of its humanistic and hermeneutic methods (reference to this can be found, e.g., in Patton 2019, 337; and Uebel 2019, 505). This is of course an intriguing viewpoint which deserves to be thoroughly explored. In her study of Mach’s historico-critical method, for example, Elisabeth Nemeth (2019) critically discusses this idea, showing that it is possible to find a broader frame of reference for his approach to scientific inquiry, including the historicist attitude of the natural sciences of his time.
Since Mach conceived of metaphysics as “what we place beyond the reach of experience–indeed, far above it, what we cannot remember ever having learnt”, including “ideas that have become absolutized” (Uebel 2021, 88), the critical elucidation he performs may be the only proper anti-metaphysical means philosophers can count on.
These humanistic features must be read in light of Ferdinand C. Schiller’s proto-pragmatist focus on the human viewpoint as the actual framework of our world-description. I hope to make this clearer in what follows.
In his seminal study, Richard Von Mises further observes that “Mach recognized that the most reliable means of clarifying methodological questions was to study their history–to follow the growth of ideas as they developed in the minds of the great scientists” (von Mises 1987, 170). In my opinion, this observation does not capture the complexity and richness of Mach’s approach to knowledge, which involves much more than the mere plane of the history of science as a discipline. By this I mean that Mach focuses on the development of ideas not only in the minds of the great scientists but in the overall history of mankind, with a special focus on how we (human beings) experience world events. Mach’s “historical method” is therefore a proper tool for epistemological reflection insofar as it engages with both the biological and the civilizational foundations of our conceptual system (on this, cf. e.g. Nemeth 2019).
Lydia Patton (2021) has recently dealt with Mach’s conception of the economy of science, providing interesting remarks on how “abstraction, pragmatism, and history work together” in his epistemological view.
The issue of what a fact is, for Mach, has only been addressed indirectly, e.g. by John Blackmore (1972, 32) and Gerald Holton (1988, 247), but a thorough study on the subject matter was recently published by De Waal and Ten Hagen. In their paper, De Waal and Ten Hagen observe that “Mach’s reputation as a positivist only interested in facts is an oversimplification” of his view. They maintain that “Mach made a clear distinction between fact and theory, but he also acknowledged that the two crucially depended on one another” (De Waal and Ten Hagen 2020, 65).
This, of course, would determine the necessity of developing an updated version of the old theory, or even replacing it completely with a new one.
In Principles of the Theory of Heat, Mach observes that “what we call a ‘theory’ or a ‘theoretical idea’ which is the starting point of a theory, falls into the category of indirect description [indirekte Beschreibung]”, that is, “a description in which we make use to a certain extent of one already given elsewhere or even of one that has yet to be worked out accurately” (Mach 1986, 365).
I will say more on this in Sect. 1.4. In his seminal work on perspectival realism, Ronald Giere provides us with a definition of “moderate constructivism” which corresponds to the view of modest realism I have outlined above. In fact, Giere’s perspectival realism is a development of what he earlier called constructivist realism (cf. Giere 2006, 11, 118). Another interesting reference for reflecting on a more “flexible” approach to scientific knowledge which is supposed to “steer a course between scientific realism and instrumentalism” is Mary Hesse, whose “consensus theory” focuses on the interplay between the theoretical and the observational activity and problematizes the idea that the world structure which scientists ordinarily claim to exist “can ever be accurately known or represented in language” (Hesse 1980, xiv, 446; on this cf. Gori 2021, 392 ff.).
On this I tend to diverge from both strong anti-realist interpretations of Mach focused exclusively on his interest in the constructed task of human knowledge (cf. e.g. Uebel 2019, 506) and readings claiming that Mach attempted to provide us with a robust realist world-description (cf. e.g. Banks 2004; 2014). Although I find Eric Banks’s interpretation fascinating and grounded in good textual evidence, I am inclined to maintain a cautious reading of Mach’s defence of direct realism about world-elements, given the number of passages in which Mach refuses to endorse any sort of metaphysical commitment (whether realist or idealist) and reiterates his interest in the plane of the experienced facts as the only realm of which one can speak properly. I have also argued that it may be possible to interpret Mach’s view as an “epistemological agnosticism”, for I believe that, in the end, Mach was not interested in investigations that try to grasp what cannot be expressed by meaningful knowledge claims (cf. Gori 2018; 2021).
On Mach’s commitment to an evolutionary epistemology–or, less radically, to a biological conception of knowledge–cf. Čapek 1968; Haller 1988; and Pojman 2011. For a contextualization of this conception in Mach’s intellectual framework, see also von Mises 1987; Wolters in Mach 1985, xiii; and Goeres 2004, 46 ff.
According to Eric Banks (2004, 43), “Mach expected the result of advances in sense physiology to be that the world elements of nature might become as directly accessible to human beings as their own sensations of colour or sound”. To appreciate Mach’s conception of direct knowledge, it may be worth looking at the experimental work which provides the background of his epistemological writings. Interesting work on this has been done, e.g., by Paul Pojman (2011) and Richard Staley (2017; 2018). On Mach’s idea that “psychology and psychophysics [were] well on their way to becoming fully exact doctrines”, and on his view of precision and progress in science, cf. also Hui 2021.
According to Sami Pihlström, this is the core of a pragmatist approach to scientific realism which attempts to moderate the tension between instrumentalism and a robust form of ontological realism. On this, cf. Pihlström 2007; 2009. For a discussion of the consistency of Mach’s epistemology with pragmatic realism, cf. Gori 2018.
On this, cf. Mach 1976, 102: “Thought does not occupy itself with things as they are in themselves, but with our concept of them; we know things only through their relations with other things.” As I will argue in the final part of this paper, statements of this sort allow us to compare Mach’s view with Hasok Chang’s.
Of course, facts are not the elements; rather, they already pertain to a perspectival viewpoint. At the same time, however, facts are the “environment” our theories should adapt to and keep pace with. They are the “reality” our scientific claims actually talk about.
On the consistency between the two anti-metaphysical approaches that can be encountered in Mach, see Guzzardi 2021, 171.
It is important to deal carefully with the value Mach ascribed to sensations and their relationship with the elements. Although he repeatedly argues that the world we can know and meaningfully describe actually consists in our sensations (Mach 1959, 12), it is worth remarking that, for him, “sensations are [only] a special type of elements” (Gereon Wolters in Mach 2008, xvii) and that according to Mach’s neutral stance, “it is misleading to conceive of elements as ‘conscious contents’ [Bewusstsinsinhalte]”, for they are a far more fundamental entity. In fact, they are Urphänomene (archetypal phenomena), which can be perceived as sensations depending on the way we look at them (Goeres 2004, 50). Actually, given the three classes of elements that Mach famously describes–“world elements” A B C; “body elements” K L M; “intra-psychical” elements α β γ–only the functional relationship between the first and the second classes can be seen as a compound of “sensations” (Mach 1959, 16). When Mach agrees to “call all elements, insofar as we regard them as dependent on […] our body, sensations”, he seems to explicitly endorse a perspectival view (Mach 1895, 209), for he maintains that when we speak of “sensations”, we project a human viewpoint onto the elements, i.e. the neutral substrate of our relationship with the world. On this, see especially the first chapter of The Analysis of Sensations (e.g. Mach 1959, 16, 17 fn., 22).
The way in which Mach considers the elements is also a problematic issue, for his texts allow for different interpretations. For example, one might argue, with Eric Banks (e.g. Banks 2014; 2021), that Mach defended a direct realist conception. Or, given that Mach claimed to be sympathetic with “the representatives of a philosophy of immanence” (especially Schuppe; Mach 1959, 46) and given that immanentist philosophers were commonly regarded as supporters of an idealist epistemology (cf. e.g. Sass 1976, 237), there may be space for an idealist interpretation of Mach’s neutral monism. But Mach also declared his aversion to any attempt to accuse him of “idealism, Berkeleianism” and other ‘-isms’ (Mach 1959, 48, 361), and he tried to avoid the realist as much as the idealist conception (cf. Mach 1959, 56). I am unable to deal with this issue here, for it would lead me far beyond the aim and scope of the present paper. Let me just say that a possible viable approach to it might start with a contextualization of Mach’s view. That is, if we consider that Mach’s criticism was oriented towards materialistic realism, on the one hand, and towards the solipsistic tendencies that follow from idealism, on the other (cf. Goeres 2004, 45, 54), there seems to be space for a more nuanced reading of the basic tenets of his epistemology.
In fact, Giere (2006, 13) makes it especially clear that “a scientific perspectivism does not degenerate into a silly relativism”, and he tries to avoid the paradoxical, extreme remark that “every perspective is regarded as [being as] good as any other”. His argument for a defence of perspectivism as a tenable thesis can be found, e.g., in Giere 2006, 81–82.
Incidentally, the core of Giere’s defence of perspectival realism relies on a reflection on colour vision. For Giere (2006, 14), “colours are real enough” but at the same time perspectival, and he especially stresses that they arise from the interaction between physical properties and our sense physiology (cf. e.g. Giere 2006, 31–32).
On this, it may be worth considering what Hans Kleinpeter–one of the early upholders of the realist interpretation of Mach’s monism, quoted by Banks in his 2014 book–says about Mach’s new realism: Mach’s “fundamental views are essentially different from those of idealistic philosophers […]. We may even call them realistic, but their realism is essentially different from so-called philosophical realism” (Kleinpeter 1906, 163-164).
Massimi traces our acknowledgement of the human vantage point back to Kant’s Copernican Revolution (Massimi 2018a, 166). Quite interestingly, she remarks that “Kant’s perspectival knowledge is […] one of the greatest legacies of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: it gives the best answer to the question ‘what is scientific knowledge?’, by providing an antidote […] against the ongoing dangers of bogus knowledge and popular opinions” (Massimi 2017, 81; cf. also 65).
Cf. also Massimi 2018b, 355: “Accuracy with respect to fundamental mathematical equations; empirical testability within the limits of well-defined tests; projectibility and heuristic fruitfulness across a variety of engineering practices, are just a few examples of the kind of standards of performance-adequacy that perspectival contexts of use may put in place for determining the truth-conditions of scientific knowledge claims”.
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This work has been funded by national funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0018.
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Gori, P. The Perspectival Realist features of Ernst Mach’s critical epistemology. J Gen Philos Sci 54, 99–124 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-022-09610-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-022-09610-9