Abstract
This paper offers a case study in philosophical history of quantum theory, focusing on the role of Bohr’s correspondence principle in the creation of the new mechanics. I argue that the principle is best understood as formal or symbolic analogy in the strictly Kantian sense of analogy. By showing how new quantum formalism embodies this philosophically loaded principle, I claim that the emergence of the new mechanics is unintelligible unless we take into account Bohr’s Kantian philosophy before 1925. This may shed fresh light on the problem of scientific rationality.
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Notes
- 1.
It is Chevalley (1995) who first described Bohr’s Kantian connection in terms of “cluster concepts.”
- 2.
Compare two similarly phrased sentences in (3.48) and (3.246).
- 3.
See Hertz (1956) [1894] for the “classical” conception of picture.
- 4.
German versions, if available, always have “anschaulich” in this place, which takes a distinctively Kantian overtone. Unfortunately, there is no uniform rendering of this key concept of Bohr and other quantum physicists in English and has been variously translated as intuitive, illustrative, evident, visualizable, etc. For example, Heisenberg’s celebrated 1927 paper on the uncertainty relation is titled “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik,” which was put into “physical’ content of \(\ldots \)” in Wheeler and Zurek (1983, p. 62). “Intuitive pictures” translates “anschaulicher Bilder.”
- 5.
Therefore, Kuhn is right in his note (Musgrave and Lakatos 1970, p. 256) where he points out deficiencies of a philosopher’s history like Latakos’s. Mine may not be free from the same accusation, but at least it is not as liberal distortions as Lakatos’s and claim to be a “rational reconstruction” to a similar extent to Kuhn’s.
- 6.
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Lee, J. (2015). The Correspondence Principle, Formal Analogy, and Scientific Rationality. In: Magnani, L., Li, P., Park, W. (eds) Philosophy and Cognitive Science II. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18479-1_10
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