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Professor Margenau and the Problem of Physical Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

W. H. Werkmeister
W. H. Werkmeister*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska
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Extract

A publication by Professor Margenau is always of interest to persons concerned with philosophy of science. This is especially true, however, of his recently published book, The Nature of Physical Reality; for this book, dealing with basic epistemological problems arising from the development of modern quantum mechanics, is the most comprehensive and most systematic formulation of its author's philosophical position and is at the same time conceived as a “challenge” to “uncritical realism, unadorned operationalism, and radical empiricism”—to points of view, that is, which Professor Margenau regards as “outmoded and in disharmony with the successful phases of contemporary physics” (v).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 1951 , pp. 183 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © 1951, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

1 McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1950; xiii, 479 pages. $6.50.

2 See, for example, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, New York, 1948; “Science, Its Concepts and Laws,” The Journal of Philosophy, XLVI, July 1949; and “An Epistemological Basis for Quantum Physics,” Philosophy of Science, XVII, January 1950.

3 My italics.

4 See, for example, Petzoldt, Joseph, Die Stellung der Relativitätstheorie in der geistigen Entwicklung der Menschheit, 2nd edition, Leipzig 1923.

5 The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, Chapter 3.

6 See my own discussion of the significance of the coherence of experience as a criterion of reality. Op. cit., 101–115.

7 My italics.

8 My italics.

9 Professor Margenau willingly accepts it because he feels that in the idea of the construct we have a “union” of particulars and universale (72; 71; 303) which avoids the nominalism-realism issue. I shall not discuss this problem in the present article.

10 See the statements: “The property, blue, with which I invest a substantival flower is other than the sensation I have of it in a particular perception” (172). And: “The observable is a kind of abstract quality, assigned as a latent attribute to objects. … It is as though the flower had a latent color” (175).

11 “For the statement, an electron, or an atom, or a mass point, or a field, is that which has such and such properties, is a constitutive definition” (237).