P. W. Bridgman, in revolt against formalism

Abstract

In the mine of recent American philosophy runs a rich and unique vein of many ores. Professor M. G. White in this book Social Thought in America* has searched these and has found among them a congru ence which he has called "the revolt against formalism." He has shown that those who work this vein with most vigour were and are, by and large, a small band of great and robust amateurs in philosophy includ ing Thorstein Veblen, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson. Despite obvious divergences of interest and profession these men are held together by a common temper which perhaps can best be labelled "pragmatism/' That is, each in his partic ular discipline has been concerned with razing the mildewed block structures of the past, and putting in their stead a new architecture moulded to the stern requirements of practical life. Though Profes sor White has not chosen to do so, I think we may add to the above group of names that of Percy Williams Bridgman, and I shall be con cerned, explicitly and implicitly, in this essay with articulating this hypothesis. It has become rather a common place that the Newtonian world picture dominated the structure of science and philosophy from the 17th Century until Maxwell and Einstein. The mechanistic and deter ministic consequences of Newtonian mechanics have long been re cognized and much discussed, but there is another corrolary which is noticed more rarely, a corrolary which can perhaps be called "New tonian formalism". Specifically what I mean is this. Among the three classic laws of motion of Newton is the famous law of inertia which states that a body at rest shall remain at rest while a body in motion shall, if no force acts, remain in uniform motion, in a straight line, to the infinite. This apparently harmless and intuitive law had for an * Footnotes are to be found at the end of the essay.