Einstein, General Relativity, and Logical Empiricism

Abstract

Through strategic use of “Geometry and Experience”, a semi-popular Einstein text, the 1929 founding document of logical empiricism sought to appropriate the world-famous physicist as one of the leading exponents of a ’scientific world view’ championed by the new logical positivism of Vienna and logical empiricism of Reichenbach’s group in Berlin. Doing so, however, required a deliberately de-contextualized reading of the Einstein text: that context pertained to ongoing attempts by Weyl, Kaluza, and Einstein himself to extend general relativity to a ‘unified field theory’ encompassing electromagnetism via a highly non-empirical method of mathematical speculation. In fact, recent studies of Einstein’s notebooks and papers from 1912 to late 1915 show that in trying to find what are known today as the field equations of gravitation, Einstein pursued a double strategy, one physical, one mathematical. As Einstein turned his attention to unified field theory following the completion of general relativity, he increasingly stressed that the mathematical strategy (beginning with the Riemann tensor and the requirement of general covariance) had proved to be the winning ticket. Even logical empiricists could entertain no doubts about Einstein’s actual philosophical orientation after his open avowal of a method of mathematical speculation in the 1933 Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford. But they chose to remain largely silent about this text and about the project of unified field theory in general, since its speculative mathematical method contravened any conceivable empiricist doctrine of meaningfulness. After all, any methodological controversy with the iconic scientist around whom logical empiricism had fashioned many of its signature doctrines could be seen as de-legitimizing its propaganda to be the sole practitioners of ‘scientific philosophy’. Nonetheless, the later Einstein’s frequent expressions of a decidedly non-empiricist doctrine of concepts as well as assertions of the virtues of ‘mathematical simplicity’ as a viable method of theory-construction quietly targeted both logical empiricism and what Einstein perceived as dominant positivist tendencies in quantum mechanics. Logical empiricism kept its disagreements with Einstein under wraps; doing so was crucial to its self-portrayal.