Operational Analysis

Extract

In the October 1937 number of Philosophy of Science Lindsay has made certain criticisms of the adequacy of the “operational method” of analyzing and giving meaning to the concepts of physics, documenting his criticisms chiefly from my own writings. In these criticisms he has made statements as to the method which I would by no means accept. This is not characteristic of his paper only, for I have seldom indeed seen a printed discussion of the method which I would accept as being an adequate or sometimes even fair representation of what I understand by it. It will perhaps pay therefore if I attempt to state what I conceive it to be all about, particularly since I have never attempted such a comprehensive statement and since my own ideas on the subject have been developing since I first wrote in the Logic of Modern Physics. For one reason I have hesitated to do this, for fear of seeming to subscribe to the not uncommon idea that we are dealing with some elaborate and profound new theory of the nature of knowledge or of meaning. I believe that I myself have never talked of “operationalism” or “operationism”, but I have a distaste for these grandiloquent words which imply something more philosophic and esoteric than the simple thing that I see. What we are here concerned with is an observation and description of methods which at least some physicists had already, perhaps unconsciously, adopted and found successful—the practise of the methods already existed. What I have attempted is to analyze these successful methods, not to set up a philosophical system and a theory of the properties that any method must have if it hopes to be successful. Since I was concerned with a technique already extant, my principal method of getting others to see what the technique involved has been to exhibit examples of the technique in action, rather than to attempt any exhaustive characterization of the technique itself.