HYPOTHESES NON FINGO

Abstract

I THINK it was H. E. Armstrong who once remarked, “we are told that the electron does everything but how it does anything we are not informed”. The criticism is that the word 'electron' is the name of a thing endowed with all the potential properties it is supposed to explain. Much the same criticism was current at one time about the ether, but the electron has perhaps attained more the status of an induction from a wide range of phenomena, while the ether could never have been ranked as more than a hypothetical entity. All the same, there are obvious difficulties in the way of regarding the electron in the light of a scientific realism: its discontinuous and continuous properties seem out of all possible relation with each other ; presumably they defeat our mental imagery because of the incommensurability of perceptual space and time-for this seems to be the crux of the distinction between geometrical and causal laws. One is occasionally struck with a suspicion that there are epistemological implications in modern scientific methods. The division of scientific writers into those who adopt a positivist attitude and those who have reacted towards realism marks, maybe, a difference in the broad conceptions of methodology. There are some writers who, as Burtt has remarked, have inverted the relation and have made a metaphysic out of a method. It is not the aim of this short article to attempt to disentangle the philosophical problems involved in the writings of those who have summarized the modern scientific interpretations of phenomena. This has already been done-at least to some extent-by acknowledged leaders in the fields of philosophy and logic. The burden of this article is that there has been, at least from the time of Huygens and Newton, an ultimate divergence in the conceptions of scientific method and in the philosophy tacitly assumed by men of science.