On Dialogues and Dialogism

Heisenberg transgressed the subtle line between “manipulation of history and deliberate deception.” (Ibid., p. 213) But the really bad guy is Bohr. “As is suitable for a prophet, Bohr talked in fables and parables.” (Ibid., p. 244) Being “an avid storyteller” (Ibid., p. 243) but – other than Bohm and Bell – “[l]acking advanced mathematical skills, Bohr could not build a new quantum ontology but instead had to use ‘common language’ and simple analogies. This personal trait, if not weakness, was canonized into the universal doctrine of the indispensability of classical concepts and the impossibility of a quantum ontology.” (Ibid., p. 259) Disabled in his computational capacities, overloaded with administrative duties, depending upon his authority to make his assistants carry out his vague intuitions, despite all “hero worship” (Ibid., p.

153), “Bohr was a tragic figure.” (Ibid., p. 271) “The legend that Bohr had some sort of access to nature’s secrets, qualitatively different from that of other mortals, directly discouraged critical dialogue.” (Ibid., p. 271) In actual fact, this legend was older than the Como lecture or the philosophy of complementarity (See Sect. 4.7.2).

Within her black and white set-up,⁴¹ Beller did not undertake any further investigation why communication was inhibited, although an interesting sociological model is available at least for the case of Bohm and von Neumann which, to my mind, might be suitably adapted. Trevor J. Pinch commences from the following distinction.

The research-area mode of articulation occurs when the disputed object forms part of the particular area of concern of scientists involved in the controversy. … The official-history mode of articulation, by contrast, occurs when the cognitive object is referred to in some other context than the immediate area of concern. … I regard this context as being mainly the production of cumulative history of rationalisation of how a particular field developed. (Pinch, 1977, p. 175)

Bohm’s (1952) proposal challenged the interpretation of quantum mechanics in the research-area mode by producing a counterexample and publishing it in the discipline’s leading journal. On the contrary, “much of the response of the [quantum mechanics] elite has been articulated in the official-history mode,” (Ibid., p. 187) mainly by restating von Neumann’s theorem. Bell’s (1966) counterexample found better acceptance than Bohm’s because he could precisely spot the defect in von Neumann’s theorem and, accordingly, dragged the opponent back into the research-area mode. In the discussions ensuing the EPR-paper, this did not happen – although the paper represented the germ of Bell’s later analysis. At bottom, it appears to me that large part of Beller’s distinction between “dialogical emergence” and “rhetorical consolidation” boils down to the two modes distinguished by Pinch.

The “attitude” (Ibid., p. 325) Beller advocates in Bohm’s footsteps is dialogism.

“[T]he notion of an overarching scientific method that guides an individual scientist is foreign to it.” (Ibid., p. 321)

From the dialogical perspective, there simply are no final, stable, elements, or facts – everything can be questioned and doubted. Nor is there a total, final resolution of tension – conflicting voices coexist, or are temporarily put aside. Rarely are they completely extinguished. A paradoxical tension exists between the openness of a scientific text, addressed to the future, and its solid roots in the past. … The dialogical nature of creativity explains why reinforcement, support from another voice is so important.

(Ibid., p. 105f.)

Dialogism takes “addressive response as the primary epistemological and social unit for the analysis of science. Thus the notion of a scientific thought presupposes the existence of an interlocutor to whom the thought is addressed or by whose statements the thought is triggered.” (Ibid., p. 308) Indispensability of an interlocutor however proves problematic at places and it creates the need to fake partners. For instance, Beller cannot show that Heisenberg ever read the works of the “lesser’ scientists”

Norman Campbell or H.A. Senftleben. However, “Campbell’s suggestion that time is statistical in nature” (Ibid., p. 97) had already been stated by Boltzmann and concerning irreducible indeterminism the name Senftleben could easily be replaced with Exner whom Heisenberg’s teacher Sommerfeld knew well (Sommerfeld, 1926) and whose priority in this matter Schrödinger defended untiringly.

Dialogism accepts the “preeminence of disagreement” and considers factual agreement as “useful but of little explanatory power.” Moreover: “Too much emphasis on agreement, combined with the philosophical thesis that theory is underdetermined by experimental data, has resulted in the excesses of the sociology of knowledge and the flattening of the cognitive to the social by social constructivists.” (All ibid., p. 309)

“In the dialogical approach, the historical, philosophical, and sociological merge into a unified viewpoint, rather than being independent perspectives.” (Ibid., p. 313) In dialogism there is “no essential difference between the process of discovery and that of justification.” (Ibid., p. 316f.) Such “dialogues underlay both the open-minded foundational research and the erection of the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics.” (Ibid., p. 2)

Beller is aware of the danger that the dialogist attitude could lead into relativism. To prevent this, she heavily counts on institutionalized rules of dialogical conduct. “What became distinctive of modern science was not so much the scientific

‘method’, or scientific ‘norms’, but the strongly institutionalized communication scheme” (Ibid., p. 312), above all the Royal Society. Now if this is all to distinguish science among other activities – presumably apart from empirical adequacy – relativism or at least elitism are lurking because even outdated theories could successfully win before the Academic High Court. Beller’s gentlemanlike rules of dialogical conduct are surprisingly lax. “Scientists appear to be too opportunistic; they often betray their ‘beliefs’ and ‘commitments’.” (Ibid., p. 311) “It was on the efficiency of the mathematical tools, and not on the metaphysical ‘paradigmatic’ issues that there was agreement in the community of quantum physicists … agreement on the potency of these tools prevented scientific practice from disintegrating, be the philosophical disagreements as large as they may.” (Ibid., p. 4) But, “outside a

dialogical context formulas are mute.” (Ibid., p. 104) I doubt whether institutions so created suffice to keep the scientific enterprise together.

Within Beller’s dialogist history, there is no such thing as the quantum revolution. She intends a “general critique of the revolutionary narratives, … an analysis of how revolutionary stories in history of science are constructed, how division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is fabricated, how the opposition is misrepresented and delegitimized.” (Ibid., p. xiii) The target is of course Thomas S.

Kuhn who “incorporated the Copenhagen ideology into an overarching theory of the growth of scientific knowledge.” (Ibid., p. 13) But the “communicative, interactional nature of scientific creativity is as alien to the revolutionary as to the revolutionary narrative.” (Ibid., p. 269) Moreover,

incommensurability excludes the possibility of being suspended between two different, incompatible worlds, of creatively participating in both, of sustaining for long a creative tension between the old and the new. Such work is possible only during a short period of crisis, disarray, inconsistency.

Incommensurability logically dictates total unquestioning, dogmatic commitment. (Ibid., p. 292)

Interestingly, Beller claims that “close historical links exist between the notion of incommensurable paradigms and the ideology of the Copenhagen dogma.” (Ibid., p.

287) It was Norwood Hanson (1958) who imported Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory into philosophy in order to defend the Copenhagen interpretation by developing

“incommensurability as linguistic untranslatability.” (Beller, 1999, p. 296) Subsequently, so Beller holds, incommensurability “was swiftly, perhaps hastily, superimposed on Kuhn’s emerging Structure, most likely as a result of an encounter with Hanson’s work.” (Ibid., p. 301) By citing a favorable review of Bohm by Feyerabend (1960), on the other hand, Beller “disclose[s] the importance of Bohm’s alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation in the emergence of a post-positivist philosophy of science.” (Ibid., p. 287) Bohm’s plea against dogmatism thus explains the “creativity and longevity of ‘normal science’”. (Ibid., p. 306)

I wonder whether this parallel represents anything but rhetorical consolidation.

But my point here is the identification of the Copenhagen paradigm with a closed theory in Heisenberg’s sense by which Hanson’s book was motivated. According to Beller the upshot is that “[u]nder the Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics can neither be modified by small changes nor supplemented by hidden variables.”

(Ibid., p. 289) This conclusion needs substantial qualification.

Heisenberg (1947) gives four criteria for a theory to be closed. First, “the concepts stemming from experience must be made precise by definitions and axioms, and their relations fixed, so that it is possible to coordinate to these concepts mathematical symbols among which a consistent system of equations exists.” (1947, p.

334) This is just a standard fact of axiomatized theory in the style perfected by the Hilbert school, which since the 1920s could be found in any text written by Logical Empiricists. Second, “the concepts of this theory must be anchored directly in experience, the must ‘denote’ something in the world of phenomena.” (Ibid., p, 334) Standard wisdom again; axiom systems may contain unintended models that are unphysical. Third, the limits of the domain of applicability of the axiomatized theory, that is the phenomena adequately described by it, are not given a priori but they are up to experience. The ideal is that the axiom system permits one to derive uniquely all relevant laws of the respective field; the axiom system is then complete and

categoric..⁴² Hilbert’s (1900) axiomatization program took the theoretical frameworks as they were presented by theoretical physicists, so that Heisenberg’s point ultimately concerns the relation between a theory formulated with mathematical precision and empirical phenomena. As I have argued elsewhere (Stöltzner 2001a), von Neumann’s Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932) was the most perfect realization of Hilbert’s program of the axiomatization of physics, and Heisenberg was so tightly connected to Göttingen to know this for sure. Thus although von Neumann’s name does not appear in Heisenberg’s short paper, one can safely conclude that von Neumann’s book stood at the back of the first three criteria of the notion of closed theory.

Only the fourth criterion moves away from axiomatics proper and steers towards Bohr’s thesis of the indispensability of classical concepts.

Even when one has moved beyond the boundaries of the “closed theory”, when accordingly new domains of experience have been ordered with new concepts, the conceptual system of the closed theory nonetheless represents an indispensible part of the language in which we talk about nature. The closed theory belongs to the preconditions of further research; we can express the result of an experiment only in terms of earlier closed theories. (Ibid., p. 335)

The last sentence indicates that Heisenberg took closed theories as a sort of historically relativized a priori. Rejecting a biologically conditioned absolute a priori, Heisenberg introduced a hierarchy according to which concepts like space, time, and causality were a priori to a higher degree than the closed forms of more recent theories.

The development [of physics since the Middle Ages] appears to us as a sequence of intellectual structures, “closed theories”, which form out of single empirical questions as a seed crystal and which eventually, when the full crystal has formed, detach from experience a purely intellectual structures [geistige Gebilde]. (Ibid., p. 336)

It appears to me that here Heisenberg simply intended to locate quantum physics within the German philosophical tradition. And the solution he took was quite a familiar one form relativity theory. In 1920 Reichenbach had tried to devise the notion of a relativized a priori, but he left this position after a correspondence with Schlick who argued that relativization of any sort violated the very intentions of Kant’s concept of a category. (See Friedman, 1994; and above) A relativized a priori is not simply self-contradictory, as Beller (1999, p. 199) believes; there existed various neo-Kantian relativizations at that time. Yet a mitigated transcendental-philosophical background of this kind is not required for assessing the axiomatic approach, for contemplating irreducible indeterminism, or the rejection of a particular alternative interpretation. This should be one of the lessons of the present book.

Suffice it to note at this place one important point about possible modifications of axiom systems. When Heisenberg at another occasion wrote that in closed theories

“[t]he connection between the different concepts in the system is so close that one could generally not change any one of the concepts without destroying the whole system,” (Beller, 1999, p. 288) this misses an important aspect of the axiomatic

42 This notion of completeness has to be distinguished from the syntactic one figuring in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems which – in Tarski’s version – denotes the fact whether all formulas true in a system are provable within

method. There are axiom systems which remain consistent even if one modifies one particular axiom that is independent of all others. Non-Euclidean and non-Archimedean geometries can be obtained in this way and at least the former has found prominent applications in general relativity. The same is true for von Neumann’s axiomatization of quantum mechanics. One of the axioms used in the No-hidden-variable theorem was too restrictive – even physically counterintuitive. (See Stöltzner 2002c) Contrary to von Neumann’s belief, a modification at this point makes possible to obtain empirically equivalent formulations of quantum mechanics, among them Bohm’s theory. When Beller concludes that “[w]hich of the assumptions one in fact discards depends on the local, theoretical, and sociopolitical circumstances” (Beller, 1999, p. 304) rather than upon deeper philosophical commitments, this plays down the important insight reached in Bell’s (1966) criticism of von Neumann’s proof.

Heisenberg is not the only quantum physicist in whom Beller detects aprioristic convictions. Also Bohr’s “attempts to arrive at true, certain, final knowledge by the mere analysis of the conditions of experience” (Ibid., p. 205) revived Kant’s attempt to win Newtonian mechanics the status of a priori knowledge. Where has the Copenhagen positivism gone which, to Bohm and Cushing’s mind, stood in the back of the notorious finality claims? Reverting the direction of influence, Beller holds that

“it was the need, or the desire, to argue for finality against threats from the opposition that led Heisenberg and Bohr to take an forceful operational stand.” (Ibid., p. 203) Among quantum physicists, positivism was initially a concept “in flux” which only later became canonized for rhetorical purposes.

“A strong belief in, or commitment to, any metaphysical presupposition acts too much like a straitjacket in a creative, conceptually fluid phase of scientific activity”

(Ibid., p. 214) in which the actors are driven by a network of dialogues, opportunist motives and the power of formal tools.

The point is not that philosophy cannot influence science. Creative scientists might adopt a certain foundational stand (sometimes indistinguishable from a traditional philosophical stand) in order to pursue a definite line of research. Such a philosophical orientation is, however, local and provisional.

The longevity of philosophical “commitment” is conterminous with its usefulness in solving the problem at hand. (Ibid., p. 58)

Since philosophy has only limited influence on scientific practice, “scientists may give all authority in interpretative matters to a few leaders, whose philosophy they are willing to accept.” (Ibid., p. 4) Thus, philosophical influences exist: “the idealist German philosopher Fichte might have been a surprising source of Heisenberg’s idea of the reduction of a wave packet.” (Ibid., p. 58)⁴³ But even when in the phase of rhetorical consolidation authoritative scientists refer to such a background, one cannot and one should not measure them by professional standards. Beller calls it a myth “that philosophical writings necessarily deal with ‘eternal’ epistemological or ontological issues, such as the ‘realism’ of atoms … [and] that philosophical writings are in principle intended to produce a systematic contribution to their subject.” (Ibid., p. 173) This weak requirement seems to me at odds with Heisenberg’s philosophical ambitions (See below).

43 Weyl seems to be a particular well-suited case in point here because his philosophical interests changed as did his scientific orientation. (See Scholz 2001).

More generally, the concept of philosophy used by Beller is too restrictive to assess the conceptual developments within the quantum generation. It does not suffice to count only references to and influences from academic or classical philosophy – or what Frank had called ‘school philosophy’ – because that particular epoch witnessed the emergence of a scientific philosophy that rejected autonomous philosophical objects and an independent philosophical method but announced an analysis of science which availed itself of scientific methods. Even though Logical Empiricism was not dominant at the time, it stood in the tradition of the German scientist-philosopher who crossed the boundary between the respective discourses. Classical examples of relevance in the present context were Hermann von Helmholtz, Johannes von Kries, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Ernst Mach, and Max Planck. Philosophical commitments in this tradition were close enough to the scientific development to be modified if deep changes – not necessarily revolutions – so required and they were in turn capable to influence scientific practice. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that trained scientists, such as Schlick, moved into professional philosophy but continued to publish in media of the scientific community, such as Die Naturwissenschaften, and consequently were read by and corresponded with scientists; compare the many letters Schlick received by top scientists reacting on his second theory of causality (Section 7.4.).

This brings us eventually back to the Forman thesis. To my mind, Beller willy-nilly introduces a substantial milieu-dependence of science just because she rejects the stabilizing force of philosophical commitments which are independent of rhetorical goals and not backed by authorities.

The variety of audiences to which orthodox quantum physicists addressed their statements was a major source of contradictory elements in their writings. Heisenberg adopted Bohr’s positivist approach for mathematically unsophisticated audiences, yet he employed elements of a realistic ontological interpretation when addressing his mathematically skilled colleagues. (Ibid., p. 172)

Incoherent as they were, within the range of his philosophical convictions, Heisenberg’s orientation was strongly influenced by the respective audience. This was precisely Forman’s starting point, and he investigated academic addresses to prove that the influence was even causal. Moreover, “[i]n dialogical accounts that acknowledge the essential formative role of scientific controversies, the line between the “cognitive”

and the “social” becomes blurred.” (Ibid., p. 144) Accepting dialogism seems to entail that the Weimar scientist either acted by retrenchment, in case they found enough addressees within a sufficiently rich scientific community, or had to interact directly with the general cultural milieu. However scientists reacted, the influence of the milieu could not reach the formalism because, as did Cushing, Beller separates the formalism – here scientists act primarily as opportunists – and the rhetorically conditioned interpretation. So it seems that the weak Forman thesis could get well along with Beller’s account. This however is not her intention.

In their recollections, the founders of quantum mechanics described their efforts to construct the new quantum mechanics as guided by a belief in indeterminism. Historians and philosophers of science often follow this lead, seeking the sources of such beliefs in the cultural milieu (Jammer 1966; Forman

1971). Yet we find no strong opinions expressed on the issue of causality during the creative stages of the erection of the new theory. (Beller, 1999, p. 26)⁴⁴

The same applies with respect to Forman’s (1984) extension. Admittedly, there was

“social pressure (for Anschaulichkeit).” (Beller, 1999, p. 109) “Yet Heisenberg showed little desire to tackle the issue of Anschaulichkeit, until subjected to concrete scientific pressure – by Schrödinger.” (Ibid., p. 70) Moreover, “description of acausality in quantum mechanics as an expression of the zeitgeist (Forman 1971) … provides only a limited perspective. The notion of zeitgeist is itself a monological notion.” (Beller, 1999, p. 313) Beller’s decisive argument against Forman, however, is that there simply was no genuine indeterminism before the advent of quantum mechanics.

I know of no quantum physicist before 1927 who did commit himself to indeterminism. Physicists at the time thought statistically along classical lines (the uniqueness of quantum probabilities was recognized only after Born’s interpretation). In classical statistical theory one starts with an assumption about equally probable cases (elementary probabilities) and derives from there more complicated probabilities … . In quantum theory, however, complex probabilities (such as transition probabilities) were introduced a priori, without being reduced to elementary probabilities. As long as no consistent theory of probabilities was developed within quantum theory, there could be no verdict over indeterminism. For Born, Jordan, and Pauli, this reasoning was an undercurrent of their struggles with the issue of indeterminism. (Ibid., p. 61f.)

This assessment is flawed in various respects. First, Schrödinger constantly emphasized his adherence to indeterminism (1922a, 1924, 1929). Second, by 1927 even classical statistical physicists did no longer talk much about classical equiprobabilities. To be sure, the second edition of von Kries’ book (1886) appeared precisely in this year and the concept of range (Spielraum) signified less radical a departure from equiprobabilities than the relative frequency interpretation; but only few physicist remained committed to this interpretation. Third, the frequency interpretation had become widely acknowledged, and since Exner (1909) it was – together with a firm empiricist stand – the main argument in favor of indeterminism.

Although the relative frequency interpretation did not solve all problems with probability in quantum mechanics, still in the mid 1930s it was strong enough to make von Neumann leave his brainchild Hilbert spaces (See Rédei, 1996). All this were interesting philosophical problems which will return again and again in the present book.

Without admitting the gradual and sometimes monological development of philosophical positions, Beller can only wonder why Heisenberg introduced a discussion about acausality into the uncertainty paper (1927) although the motive was absent from the previous correspondence with Pauli.

We can only speculate about what caused Heisenberg to turn to this issue… Did Heisenberg read, hear, or see something of the acausal spirit prevalent in his cultural milieu? We probably will never know the answer. Yet realizing how contingent the introduction of the acausality issue into the uncertainty paper was, and how closely tied to the original content of the paper it later became, is very instructive. (Beller, 1999, p. 111)

44 Notice that Beller identifies causality with determinism (Cf. ibid, p. 59).

But at least the ambitious Heisenberg got his call to a great philosophical problem just at the right dialogical moment in time.

Strong sentiments against causality quickly arose precisely because causality was an intrinsic part of the threat from the opposition. … The interpretative attempts of quantum theorists took place against a background of philosophical controversies about the changed status of space and time concepts implied by Einstein’s relativity. Young Heisenberg witnessed the emotional and politically charged confrontation between Einstein and the neo-Kantians. … [Being an] intensely ambitious man … Heisenberg wanted to be the new Kant [his teacher Sommerfeld had called for] – in his initial presentations of the uncertainty principle to academic audiences, he always described the abandonment of the “Kantian category of causality” as a natural continuation of Einstein’s overthrow of Kantian space and time as forms of intuition. (Ibid., p. 195)

By that time, however, this honor was no more available. Long time ago Vienna Indeterminists had executed Mach’s criticism of the Kantian categories without distinguishing treatment of space-time and causality. In an article for Die Naturwissenschaften surveying the development of quantum mechanics from 1918 to 1928, Heisenberg wrote alluding to the issue of causality:

As with relativity theory, the physical understanding of quantum theory was accordingly only possible on the basis of a revision and extension of the world of classical concepts, that is, on the basis of a careful epistemological investigation of the concepts to be introduced in the theory. (Heisenberg, 1929, p. 495)

Summing up, Heisenberg’s position about causality agreed with Logical Empiricists while his concept of closed theory introduced a relativized form of synthetic a priori which Logical Empiricists should have emphatically objected to. Surprisingly, this difference did not appear during the discussion following Heisenberg’s (1931) talk at the Königsberg meeting for “Epistemology of the Exact Sciences.” But Logical Empiricists were usually reluctant to criticize leading scientists in public; they rather attempted to include them into their strategic alliances to combat metaphysical misinterpretations of modern science – even if such misinterpretations derived support from certain enunciations of these scientists themselves.

What can we ultimately make of the dialogist approach? Dropping the problematic indispensability of a dialogue partner or social context of addressees for any new claim advanced by a scientist, dialogism becomes close to truism. However, because of its narrow focus the dialogist analysis, on some instances, becomes close to watching Brownian particles under the microscope. One can hardly see how long-term commitments unfold and stabilize; to continue the picture, Beller could just notice that a sort of phase transition occurred circa 1927 and had to chance the temporal magnification of dialogical analysis. In both cases neither philosophical convictions nor Lakatosian research programs could be discriminated because, to my mind, they require a larger timescale to unfold. On the microscopic scale it is impossible from the very beginning to assess the commitments of the German scientist-philosophers and to verify whether philosophical positions played a role in their concept of science. This is a pity because, to my mind, they acted much more in a dialogical fashion that did the classical German philosophical schools, above all neo-Kantianism which by and large identified themselves by self-declared adherence to a certain philosophical school. But my main point here is that philosophical traditions if not committed to schools emerge

from dialogues with opponents and they involve precisely that kind of combination of outside self-identification and substantial internal disagreements which Beller found so characteristic of the Göttingen-Copenhagen dogma. In particular the Vienna Circle combined manifestos, a large series of historical self-identifications, the foundation of various projects and institutions which sought to integrate wider circle – from the Ernst Mach Society up to the International Congresses for the Unity of Science, the Encyclopedia Project, and the various organizations in exile.

During the last two decades, detailed historiographical investigations into Logical Empiricism have uncovered a multitude of diverging voices, unraveled many internal strands, and found basic concepts in flux. Examples of explicit dialogues abound, among them the discussion with Wittgenstein that lead to a major division of the Vienna Circle after 1930 (Cf. Bergmann, 1993), and the protocol sentence debate between Carnap and Neurath (Uebel, 1992).⁴⁵ This diversity stood in strange contrast to the party-like unity exhibited in the manifesto (Hahn, Neurath, Carnap, 1929) and Neurath’s historiographies of the movement. They felt themselves immersed in a hostile milieu dominated by ‘school philosophy’. Due to similar historical scrutiny we have meanwhile learned that the Copenhagen interpretation was of the same kind.

In its second phase (Chapters 7 & 8) the causality debate represented such an internal development. Without hiding their disagreements, in 1936 Schlick and Frank nevertheless sought a united stand against misinterpretations of Bohr’s concept of complementarity. (See Section 8.7.) Dialogues in these cases were more implicit than outspoken. But there were also open polemics, departing from the one between Planck and Mach (Section. 3.7.) In a very general sense, so I would claim, the entire philosophical debate about genuine indeterminism developed as a sequence of dialogues between Vienna and Berlin that extended over roughly two decades. The main dialogues will be Planck’s encounters with Mach, Exner and Schrödinger, Schlick’s and Frank’s diverging assessment of Mach, the mutually supportive dialogue between Frank and von Mises, Schlick’s dialogues with his teacher Planck, Schlick’s correspondence with Schrödinger, a group of less prominent encounters between Schottky, Nernst, and Petzoldt and between von Laue, Schrödinger, and von Mises.

Important differences go back to distinct roots, most important the Machian and the neo-Kantian heritage which set the initial frontlines in the dialogue about Boltzmann’s legacy. Against the alternative between rational legitimation and historical contingency, I shall emphasize the stabilizing factor of honest – that is: not rhetoric-driven – philosophical convictions and spot a forum in which many dialogues took place.

45 For a comprehensive account see the books of (Haller, 1993) and (Stadler, 2001).

Im Dokument Causality, realism and the two strands of Boltzmann's legacy (1896 - 1936) (Seite 71-80)