Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss Mandelstam’s philosophical position, which, according to the present author, may be characterized as operationalism. In the world literature, the position of the American physicist, Nobel Prize winner for his work in high-pressure physics, Bridgman Percy (1882–1961) is called operationalism. In 1927, Bridgman published a book “The Logic of Modern Physics”, which contains the thesis, which became the banner of operationalism: “the concept is synonymous with a corresponding set of operations”. For example, “the concept of length is fixed when the operations by which length is measured is fixed, that is, the concept of length involves as much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which length is determined”.
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Notes
- 1.
Sonin’s book [324] is cited here. Sonin also wrote a big book concerned with the accusations of some Soviet scientists of “cosmopolitism” in the Cold War years [325]. In the latter, there is no excursion to the Aleksandrov 1952 lecture. As a matter of fact, A.D. Aleksandrov’s attack on Mandelstam’s operationalism requires a more detailed analysis. It is clear that A.D. Aleksandrov, who was a famous topologist writing on the philosophy of space, could not accept operationalism. However, it is not clear why he preferred such a form of his attack (Aleksandrov’s lecture dedicated to Mandelstam’s “Complete Work”).
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Pechenkin, A. (2019). Mandelstam’s Operationalism. In: L.I. Mandelstam and His School in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17685-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17685-3_14
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