Phenomenalism and Its Difficulties

Abstract

Modern physics has presented many challenges to the philosopher and has forced him to alter his conceptions of space, time, and causality. Physics itself has required thorough epistemological analysis, since the logical presuppositions of the new concepts were not sufficiently clear and seeming inconsistencies and contradictions needed attention. The situation with respect to the theory of relativity is, however, different from the one in quantum physics. In the case of the former, we have succeeded with an unobjectionable conceptual clarification, satisfactory from an epistemological as well as from a physical point of view. Serious objections against the philosophical interpretation of the theory of relativity, of the kind which appeared at the time it first became known and were later brought up in numerous forms, are no longer raised today. This is in no small measure due to Reichenbach, who, in his philosophy of space and time, had provided us with an interpretation of the relativity theory of space and time which is also satisfactory from a philosophical point of view. The same author has made an attempt to present in his workPhilosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics 1 an analogous clarification of the logical foundation of quantum theory. While Reichen-bach’s doctrine of space-time is generally accepted by the theoretical physicists, his philosophical interpretation of quantum physics has encountered considerable opposition; Reichenbach sees no way out of certain difficulties, the so-called ’causal anomalies’, other than giving up the classical two-valued logic and replacing it with a three-valued logic.