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Talking at cross-purposes: how Einstein and the logical empiricists never agreed on what they were disagreeing about

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Abstract

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach into a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, this paper shows that not only did Einstein and Logical Empiricists come to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but also that in their lifelong interchange, they never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his ”measuring rod objection” against Weyl. On the contrary, Logical Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein–Weyl debate, tried to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz–Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmholtzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, the philosophical significance of which, however, still needs to be fully explored.

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Notes

  1. Henceforth I will provide the original German of those passages that I translated myself.

  2. Einstein refers to a private conversation.

  3. Einstein’s 1910–1911 lecture notes on Electricity and Magnetism testifies his early commitment to this epistemological ideal: a physical theory, Einstein remarks, is “a conceptual system whose individual parts do not correspond immediately to experiential facts”, but it “is true or false, i.e., corresponding or not corresponding to experience, onlyas a whole” (CPAE 3, Doc. 11, 325; cf. Howard 1994, 91f.)

  4. As Jürgen Ehlers has pointed out, “[a]part from Albert Einstein nobody has contributed more to the conceptual clarification of the general theory of relativity than Hermann Weyl” (Ehlers 1988a, 84f.). Needless to say, no attempt is made to offer an exhaustive overview of Weyl’s contributions to the mathematical and philosophical foundations of spacetime theories. One may consult (Bell and Korté 2011, §§4.1, 4.3, 4.4) for a recent detailed account and further bibliographic references.

  5. The reference is to Reichenbach (1920) and Freundlich (1920).

  6. In 1927, the International Conference on Weights and Measures redefined the meter in terms of a red cadmium spectral line (1 m = 1,553,164.13 times the wavelength of the 6436.4696 Å cadmium red line).

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    Marco Giovanelli

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Giovanelli, M. Talking at cross-purposes: how Einstein and the logical empiricists never agreed on what they were disagreeing about. Synthese 190, 3819–3863 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0229-1

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