Abstract
In Der Raum,1 Carnap begins his discussion of physical space by inquiring whether and how a line in this space can be identified as straight. Arguing from testability and not, as we did in Chapter One, from the continuity of that manifold, he answers this inquiry as follows: “It is impossible in principle to ascertain this, if one restricts oneself to the unambiguous deliverances of experience and does not introduce freely chosen conventions in regard to objects of experience.”2 And he then points out that the most important convention relevant to whether certain physical lines are to be regarded as straights is the specification of the metric (“Mass-setzung”), which is conventional because it could “never be either confirmed or refuted by experience:” Its statement takes the following form: “A particular body and two fixed points on it are chosen, and it is then agreed what length is to be assigned to the interval between these points under various conditions (of temperature, position, orientation, pressure, electrical charge, etc.).
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Notes
R. Carnap: Der Raum (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard; 1922), p. 33.
Ibid., p. 26; H. P. Robertson: “Geometry as a Branch of Physics,” Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. by P. A. Schilpp (Evanston: Library of Living Philosophers; 1949), pp. 327–29, and “The Geometries of the Thermal and Gravitational Fields,” American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. LVII (1950), pp. 232–45; and E. W. Barankin: “Heat Flow and Non-Euclidean Geometry,” American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. XLIX (1942), pp. 4–14.
H. Reichenbach: The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press; 1951), 133
R. Carnap: Preface to H. Reichenbach’s The Philosophy of Space and Time (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1975), p. 7
E. Nagel: The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World; 1961), p. 264, n. 19.
F. Klein: Vorlesungen über Nicht-Euklidische Geometrie ( Berlin: Springer-Verlag; 1928 ), p. 281.
Dingler: “Die Rolle der Konvention in der Physik,” Physikalische Zeitschrift, Vol. XXIII (1922), p. 50.
E. H. Hutten: The Language of Modern Physics (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., and New York: The Macmillan Company; 1956), p. 110.
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© 1973 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grünbaum, A. (1973). Critique of Reichenbach’s and Carnap’s Philosophy of Geometry. In: Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2622-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2622-2_3
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