Abstract
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the most urgent problem for philosophers of science appeared to be that of reconciling their philosophies with the astonishing discoveries in space-time theory and electromagnetism. Albert Einstein had written his remarkable paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, better known as the Special Theory of Relativity (STR); Max Planck had introduced his counterintuitive quantum hypothesis to explain the empirical laws of black body radiation; and Einstein had used Planck’s theory of atomic resonators to explain the photoelectric effect. The world of physics, which until then had seemed so solid and well ordered, was shaken and in some disarray. For these developments appeared not to be reconcilable with the Newtonian worldview that had, until then, dominated the scientific image of reality.
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Notes
- 1.
John Fox (2007) has recently convinced me that I did make one serious error of this kind. My ‘dinch’ scale for the measurement of length leads to inconsistencies, given the way in which I proposed to use it.
- 2.
I remember Grünbaum saying to me once something to the effect that ‘The analytic-synthetic distinction [i.e., the distinction between what is true in virtue of the meanings of words, and what is not] is one thing, and may well be untenable, but the fact-convention distinction is another, and is absolutely fundamental’.
- 3.
My 1963 paper was not published until November of that year.
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Ellis, B. (2014). From Conventionalism to Scientific Metaphysics. In: Oppy, G., Trakakis, N. (eds) History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6958-8_12
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