The Doctrine of Structure

Abstract

The previous chapters have described Eddington’s attempt to work out an interpretation of the physical sciences which would combine operationalism and its consequent subjectivism with the causal theory and its concomitant implication of a non-sensible, real world. I have argued that there is no contradiction in such an effort, that operationalism is a restricted doctrine whose validity and value are confined to the actual working of physicists, while the broader perspective which seeks to place the physical sciences in their context is appropriate to a full philosophical interpretation of those sciences. The physicist in his laboratory need not be concerned with the genesis of sensation or with its causal antecedents: his concern as a worker in the field of physics is only with the data of his machines and instruments. It is from these that he strives to construct a world. But very few physicists, of course, content themselves with such compartmentalized duties, with such narrow, inhuman reflections. It is in his concern with the origins of his data and their significance that the working scientist becomes a philosopher. We have seen how Köhler insists that even the working scientist must look beyond his data in order to impart meaning to them, the context within the phenomenal field constituting the base from which meaning arises for the pointer readings.