Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honour of Adolf Grünbaum

348 Pages·1983·28.64 MB·English

by  Alberto Coffa (auth.)

PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY
Griinbaum Editorial Committee:
R. S. COHEN
Boston University
C. G. HEMPEL
University ofP ittsburgh
L. LAUDAN
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
N. RESCHER
University of Pittsburgh
and
W. C. SALMON
University ofP ittsburgh
VOLUME 76
PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY
AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Essays in Honor of Adolf Grilnbaum
Edited by
R. s. COHEN
Boston University
and
L. LAUDAN
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LANCASTER
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Physics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
(Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 76)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Physics-Philo sophy-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Philos
ophy-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Psychoanalysis-Addresses,
essays;lectures. 4. Griinbaum, Adolf. I. Griinbaum, Adolf.
II. Cohen, Robert Sonne. III. Series.
Q174.B67 vol. 76 [QC6.21 501s 1530'.011 83-4576
ISBN-I3: 978-94-009-7057-1 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-7055-7
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-7055-7
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
by Kluwer Boston Inc.,
190 Old Derby Street, Hingham, MA 02043, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed
by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
and copyright holders as specified on appropriate pages within.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 15t edition 1983
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
EDITORIAL PREFACE
To celebrate Adolf Griinbaum's sixtieth birthday by offering him this bouquet
of essays written for this purpose was the happy task of an autonomous
Editorial Committee: Wesley C. Salmon, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan,
Carl G. Hempel, and Robert S. Cohen. To present the book within the
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was altogether fitting and
natural, for Griinbaum has' been friend and supporter of philosophy of
science at Boston University for twenty-five years, and unofficial godfather
to the Boston Colloquium. To regret that we could not include contributions
from all his well-wishers, critical admirers and admiring critics, is only to
regret that we did not have an encyclopedic space at the committee's disposal.
But we, and all involved in this book, speak for all the others in the philo
sophical, scientific, and personal worlds of Adolf Griinbaum in greeting him
on May 15, 1983, with our wishes for his health, his scholarship, his happiness.
Our gratitude is due to Carolyn Fawcett for her care and accuracy in editing
this book, and for the preparation of the Index; and to Elizabeth McMunn
for her help again and again, especially in preparation of the Bibliography of
the Published Writings of Adolf Griinbaum; and to Thelma Griinbaum for
encouraging, planning, and cheering.
Boston University R.S.C.
Center for the Philosophy and History of Science M.W.W.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORIAL PREFACE v
ROBERT S. COHEN / Adolf Grtinbaum: A Memoir ix
ALBERTO COFFA / Geometry and Semantics: An Examination of
Putnam's Philosophy of Geometry
MORRIS N. EAGLE / The Epistemological Status of Recent Devel-
opments in Psychoanalytic Theory 31
CLARK GLYMOUR / The Theory of Your Dreams 57
CARL G. HEMPEL / Valuation and Objectivity in Science 73
ALLEN I. JANIS / Simultaneity and Conventionality 101
LARR Y LA UDAN I The Demise of the Demarcation Problem 111
PHILIP L. QUINN I Griinbaum on Determinism and the Moral Life 129
NICHOLAS RESCHER / The Unpredictability of Future Science 153
BENJAMIN B. RUBINSTEIN / Freud's Early Theories of Hysteria 169
KENNETH F. SCHAFFNER I Clinical Trials: The Validation of
Theory and Therapy 191
ABNER SHIMONY / Reflections on the Philosophy of Bohr,
Heisenberg, and SchrOdinger 209
BRIAN SKYRMS / Zeno's Paradox of Measure 223
JOHN ST ACHEL / Special Relativity from Measuring Rods 255
ROBERTO TORRETTI I Causality and Spacetime Structure in
Relativity 273
BAS C. V AN FRAASSEN I Calibration: A Frequency Justification
for Personal Probability 295
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ADOLF GRVNBAUM 321
INDEX OF NAMES 333
ADOLF GRUNBAUM
(Photo by permission of Nathaniel Braverman)
ADOLF GRUNBAUM: A MEMOIR
Due to the instinctive genius of the New York City school system, I (from
Manhattan) met Adolf Griinbaum (from the farthest reaches of Brooklyn)
at the DeWitt Clinton High School (in the northernmost Bronx) about
forty-five years ago. Coming with parents, sister and brother, he was a very
recent refugee from Cologne. We had two-hour subway rides to school,
more than ten thousand fellow students (all male), a splendid four years of
Latin, and world politics going down toward disaster; but to my delight
I found a friend who had read Bertrand Russell and who already understood
that a life of the mind and a life of action were possible together, and even
more, that love of physics and love of philosophy could be joined. I went on
to Wesleyan University in 1939, and Adolf joined me there a year later; we
went to Yale Graduate School briefly for master's degrees, and then again
after the Second World War, to complete our doctorates, to live in a coop
erative house named Steamview, to study with such great teachers and scholars
as Brand Blanshard, Peter Hempel, Henry Margenau, Paul Weiss, Leigh Page,
Gregory Breit, F. S. C. Northrop, the young Fred Fitch, Charles Hendel.
His parents, Benjamin and Hannah, became my dear friends; later, our wives
and children too formed a beloved circle. Our philosophical comradeship
was from the beginning a humane and enduring affectionate friendship.
Shall I prepare an objective, impersonal memoir? Certainly not.
Adolf Griinbaum was born May 15, 1923. He came to the United States
in 1938, and was naturalized in 1944, while serving in the United States
Army. He married Thelma Braverman on June 26, 1949, and they have a
daughter, Barbara. Adolf had absorbed the shock of American life quickly,
while his parents met their mid-life challenge of this new world with Stoic
courage. And courage was needed for the hard labor of the immigrant worker
who had been a comfortable middle-class German Jewish housewife, for the
fortitude of the intenninably ill father, and the poverty for all of them, the
two younger children, and the other relatives who had escaped from Germany.
Griinbaum looked ahead to a life of learning, but the family could not
help; with luck, the American mixture of self-help and charitable scholarship
stipends worked. He came to Wesleyan, to the small Connecticut city of
Middletown, a mixture of Yankees and Sicilians who in their different ways
ix
x ADOLF GRUNBAUM: A MEMOIR
were so very far from either German or New York cosmopolitan life: there
he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the small, quiet, private
undergraduate college, itself still in the glow of its Methodist origins, still
predominantly Protestant, white, all-male, a genteel middle-class cousin to
the wealthier elite Ivy League universities. But the isolated college world was
being shaken by the outside world, by the financial rigors of the great depres
sion that ended only in the swirl of war already underway in Europe, by the
obvious intrusion among all the students of the coming American role in the
war, by the sweet and intelligent sole Jewish faculty member, the political
sociologist Sigmund Neumann, a refugee from Berlin.
Wesleyan had a tradition of scholarly research, and Griinbaum plunged
into his courses, as if each of them were somehow to be transmuted into a
seminar on the logical and philosophical foundations of its subject, whether
the calculus or classical mechanics or an innocent elementary laboratory
experiment. Adolfs reputation for endless philosophizing came early. His
main philosophical teacher at Wesleyan, the wise and gentle Quaker, Cornelius
Kruse, once met us on the street, and when, on inquiry, he learned that we
were so deep in argument about a calculus problem that we barely noticed
him, he spread the word that we were debating about Berkeley, or perhaps
Cantor, or at any rate about infmity and Zeno's paradoxes. We were in fact
going to the movies.
Griinbaum was dogged as well as deep. In high school, scarcely in America,
studying Latin, barely fluent in English, he decided that a civilized human
being must also know French, and so he set himself that task too. He may be
the only American, German refugee or not, who learned French by patiently,
doggedly, reading Les Mis~rables.
His war service, and his graduate work at Yale, came quickly since the
undergraduate curriculum was greatly compressed, accelerated to meet
manpower needs. Griinbaum worked for a time in a radar-related military
research group of the Columbia University Division of War Research, located
to our pleasure (I was there too) in the upper reaches of the Empire State
Building. But soon he was in the United States Army, and like so many young
German-speaking refugees, he was assigned to combat intelligence, and then
occupation service. How strange it was for him to interrogate German
academic prisoners, the young American army philosopher confronting the
members of the established German professoriat. I recall some trophies he
sent me from Hitler's Reichskanzlei in Berlin, especially a set of the great
Muret-Sanders encyclopedic English-German dictionary, and more vividly
his letters concerning the interrogations of such Nazi scientists as the mathe-
,.
ADOLF GRUNBAUM: A MEMOIR xi
matician Bieberbach and the physicist Lenard. But also the splendid surgeon
Sauerbruch. He also was very happy to find a beautiful set of the papers of
Helmholtz for me, and a fascinating unpublished manuscript on 'Scheinpro
bleme der Wissenschaft', written during the last years of war by the aged and
noble Max Planck.
Back at Yale, Griinbaum completed his M.S. in physics, and then under
took studies and dissertation research for the doctorate in philosophy. That
dissertation, on 'The Philosophy of Continuity' [5 - see Bibliography] was
inspired (as I believe Griinbaum would happily agree) by Hans Reichenbach's
great treatise, the Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre of 1928, and written
with Reichenbach's student at Berlin, C. G. Hempel, as Adolfs faculty
advisor. It went directly to conceptual criticism of previous work on Zeno's
paradoxes; an impressive result was Griinbaum's own analysis, a model of
mathematical and philosophical argument, of which a major part was published
as 'A consistent conception of the extended linear continuum as an aggregate
of unextended elements' [9].
Griinbaum was married by then to the extraordinarily intelligent and
lovely Thelma whom he had first met during his high school years; he received
his first faculty appointment at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Penn
sylvania, in 1950. And then he set to work.
Looking over the thirty-three years since 1950, we find that Adolf Griinbaum
has written five books, and more than a hundred articles. His research may be
described under three headings:
(1) space and time,
(2) scientific rationality, and the falsifiability criterion,
(3) the cognitive status of psychoanalytic theory.
But his thought and influence reach further. Ethical and religious issues
have always demanded his concern and his analysis. His early paper, 'Causality
and the science of human behavior' [8], also published in 1952, has been
reprinted in psychological, psychoanalytic and philosophical journals and
anthologies, revised and developed over the years. I think also of his courses
on 'science and religion', his clarifying research on Freud's methods and
theories, his life-long interest in the rational understanding of social con
flicts, his vigorous recruitment of superb moral theorists among his colleagues.
Especially, I enjoy his caustic delight and incredulity at exposure of a
particular piece of institutional obfuscation or individual wishful thinking.
His style is not Bertrand Russell's limpid grace, and his philosophical method
is closer to technical physics than Russell's (and less that of the logician)