Pragmatism in Physics

Abstract

A primary focus in the history of philosophy has been on the foundations of physics. The philosophers who have engaged themselves in examining the foundations are too numerous to mention. Great historical figures, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Kant, come immediately to mind. It is also evident that the foundational examination of physics does not play a very significant role in contemporary physics. In fact, the situation is even more subtle than this remark would indicate. Specialized topics in the foundations of physics, such as the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, or the nature of quantum logic, have in themselves become highly specialized subdisciplines lying at the interface between philosophy, physics and mathematics. The purely formal or mathematical aspects are particularly evident in the detailed developments of quantum logic, more so than is the case for the measurement problem. Although I myself have been involved over many years, in fact from my earliest publications in the 1950s, in foundational work in physics, in this paper I want to step back from that tradition. It will continue, I am sure, to be important in philosophy, and will have some currency among physicists, for its focus on the foundations of physics. But the point of my analysis today is what are the central tendencies of physics, as opposed to the rather specialized foundational tendencies emphasized mainly by philosophers. My main thesis is that pragmatism reigns in physics in a way that is completely different from anything to be found in pure mathematics, and that pragmatism is, surprisingly, more evident in pure physics than in more recent but increasingly mathematically oriented disciplines such as economics. There are three principal ways in which I think of physics as being dominated by pragmatism. The fust is that both theoretical and experimental physics are not at all obeisant to any form of foundationalism, either of a formal or axiomatic kind, or of an epistemological emphasis on epistemic certainty. Theoretical physicists do not really operate in an axiomatic mold and actual theoretical work in physics doesn’t primarily proceed in an axiomatic way, contrary to pure mathematics. By the way, this is not a conceptual claim about theoretical physics, but an empirical claim. There are good practical reasons, but not strong reasons of principle, why theoretical physics could not always be done in an axiomatic way. The rough and tumble of the actual work in theoretical physics, a complicated interplay of experimental facts and theoretical assumptions of a variety of kinds, explain perhaps why formal or axiomatic approaches are very much in the background. I make this, as I say, as an empirical claim. Readers who don’t beP. Weingartner, G. Schurz and G. Dorn (eds.), The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy, 236-53. Copyright O 1998 Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna.

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