The Operational Attitude

Abstract

Eddington was one of the first scientists who appreciated the revolutionary changes in our philosophical view of the world entailed by the new relativity theories in physics. He was concerned to make explicit the philosophical foundations of the new science, but he had no pretensions as to the adequacy of these foundations for a complete understanding of our world. Science and its philosophical presuppositions provided only one of several approaches to reality. Eddington was careful to indicate the precise bounds of the physical sciences, demarcating them from religion and esthetics and all other normative fields of thought. “Life would be stunted and narrow,” he wrote in his Gifford lectures, “if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicists or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.” (NPW, p. 317) Later, in his Tamer lectures, while stressing the limitations of scientific knowledge to observation, he shows the same recognition of the partial view of the sciences towards the world.