Patrick A. Heelan

(1926 - 2015)

Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg’s physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan’s experience in Eugene Wigner’s laboratory at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan’s years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin. A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invaluable for courses in the history of science.

The authors’ aim in this book is “to understand—from a philosophical standpoint—the social and historical nature of science, more precisely, its sociability and historicity”. “This book was created within a dialogue” between the two authors, and between our “friends”—those who supported a hermeneutic stance toward the natural sciences—and our “antagonists”—those belonging to the analytic philosophy of science. The dialogue took place at the University of Pittsburgh where McGuire is a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Tuchanska was a visitor from the University of Lodz in Poland. They describe their task as “overcoming the limits of analytic philosophy of science with respect to conceptions of the scientist, scientific cognition, and the objects of science.” Expanding on this, the authors say that the task “requires going beyond the subject/object dichotomy that underlies scientific cognition and most modern philosophy. Certainly the subject/object opposition has been problematized. The names of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger, or Gadamer come readily to mind. Their aim was purely philosophical: to reveal elements underlying both the subject and the object of cognition predominantly from the point of view of the individual cognizer. However, apart from the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Cassirer, Collingwood, and Gadamer, few attempts have been made to situate human cognition ontologically within the social, the cultural, and the historical. Our aim is to address these dimensions of cognition, especially in regard to scientific cognition”.

Heisenberg, in constructing quantum mechanics, explicitly followed certain principles exemplified, as he believed, in Einstein's construction of the special theory of relativity which for him was the paradigm for radical theoretic change in physics. These were the principles of scientific realism, stability of background knowledge, E-observability, contextual re-interpretation, pragmatic continuity, model continuity, simplicity. Fifty years later, in retrospect, Heisenberg added the following two: a principle of non-proliferation of competing theories - scientific revolutions are not a legitimate goal of physics - and a principle of tenacity - existing theories are to be conserved as far as possible. The conservative as well as the revolutionary potential of these principles is then discussed. A more penetrating philosophical criticism of these principles is postponed

Quantum mechanics has raised in an acute form three problems which go to the heart of man's relationship with nature through experimental science: (r) the public objectivity of science, that is, its value as a universal science for all investigators; (2) the empirical objectivity of scientific objects, that is, man's ability to construct a precise or causal spatio-temporal model of microscopic systems; and finally (3), the formal objectivity of science, that is, its value as an expression of what nature is independently of its being an object of human knowledge. These are three aspects of what is generally called the "crisis of objec tivity" or the "crisis of realism" in modern physics. This crisis is. studied in the light of Werner Heisenberg's work. Heisenberg was one of the architects of quantum mechanics, and we have chosen his writings as the principal source-material for this study. Among physicists of the microscopic domain, no one except perhaps Bohr has expressed himself so abundantly and so profoundly on the philosophy of science as Heisenberg. His writings, both technical and non-technical, show an awareness of the mysterious element in scientific knowledge, far from the facile positivism of Bohr and others of his contemporaries. The mystery of human knowledge and human SUbjectivity is for him an abiding source of wonder.

The classical notion of scientific objectivity is a property of propositional truth. It is the property of being open to testing and inspection, in principle, by all men, although in practice perhaps, the testing of a scientific claim is restricted to the members of a community of professional experts. It is, moreover, the property of being stable in time, true eternally as it were; for objective truth is thought to express what is so independently of human interests, initiatives, bias, social circumstances and historical environment. Often there is the added connotation that what is so is pictured not in its relationship to man, but absolutely, as it were, in itself, or in its relations to the rest of nature, where nature is taken to have an essence independently of the meaning conferred on nature by Dasein. All this is expressed as truth-invariance relative to synchronous communities of knowers whether sympatric or allopatric : truth-invariance relative to allochronous communities of knowers, and truth-invariance relative to the physical transformations and substitutions which define the objective content of a scientific law or theory.

IN A recent work I have attempted to show that visual space tends to have a Euclidean geometrical structure only when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly faceted objects carpentered to exhibit simple standard Euclidean shapes, and tends to have a hyperbolic structure when vision is deprived of these clues. I conclude that visual perception--and by analogy, all perception--is hermeneutic as well as causal: it responds to structures in the flow of optical energy, but the character of its response is also hermeneutical, that is, it has the capacity to "read" the appropriate structures in the World, and to form perceptual judgments of the World about which these "speak." The clues that are "read" perceptually as giving a Euclidean visual space are engineered objects, such as streets and buildings with repetitive architectural elements. These scientific artifacts of human culture belong to a family of readable technologies central to the phenomenological and existential-hermeneutical analysis of natural science.

Using the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, and against the background of the principle that the real is what is or can be given in a public way in perception as a state of the World, and of the thesis established elsewhere that acts of perception are always epistemic, contextual, and hermeneutical, the writer proposes that objects of scientific observation are perceptual objects, states of the World described by theoretical scientific terms and, therefore, real. This thesis of Hermeneutical Realism is proved by showing how the response of a standard instrument is 'read' as if it were a 'text'. Conclusions are then drawn about a number of topics, including Scientific Realism, Conventionalism, and Cultural Relativism.

Hermeneutics, or interpretation, is concerned with the generation, transmission, and acceptance of meaning within the lifeworld, and was the original method of the human sciences stemming, from F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey. The `hermeneutic philosophy' refers mostly to Heidegger. This paper addresses natural science from the perspective of Heidegger's analysis of meaning and interpretation. Its purpose is to incorporate into the philosophy of science those aspects of historicality, culture, and tradition that are absent from the traditional analysis of theory and explanation, to re-orient the current discussion about scientific realism around the hermeneutics of meaning and truth in science, and to establish some relationship between the current philosophy of natural science and hermeneutical philosophy. The paper has particular relevance to the history and social studies of science and technology

The author proposes the thesis that all perception, including observation in natural science, is hermeneutical as well as causal; that is, the perceiver (or observer) learns to 'read' instrumental or other perceptual stimuli as one learns to read a text. This hermeneutical aspect at the heart of natural science is located where it might be least expected, within acts of scientific observation. In relation to the history of science, the question is addressed to what extent the hermeneutical component within scientific observation opens natural science to the charge of reflecting merely cultural values, and of providing merely a culturally acceptable reading of the "Book of Nature", rather than, as the author states, one stating universal antecedent conditions of possibility of cultural activity itself

Two philosophical traditions with much in common, (classical) pragmatism and (Heidegger's) hermeneutic philosophy, are here\ncompared with respect to their approach to the philosophy of science. Both emphasize action as a mode of interpreting experience.\nBoth have developed important categories – inquiry, meaning, theory, praxis, coping, historicity, life-world – and each has\noffered an alternative to the more traditional philosophies of science stemming from Descartes, Hume, and Comte. Pragmatism's\nabduction works with the dual perspectives of theory (as explanation) and praxis (as culture). The hermeneutical circle depends\nin addition on the lifeworld as background source of ontological meaning and resource for strategies of inquiry. Thus a hermeneutical\nphilosophy of research involves three components: lifeworld (as ontological and strategic), theory (as explanatory), and praxis\n(as constitutive of culture)

A structural analogy is pointed out between a check hermeneutically developed phenomenological description, based on Husserl, of the process of perceptual cognition on the one hand and quantum mechanical measurement on the other hand. In Husserl's analytic phase of the cognition process, the 'intentionality-structure' of the subject/object union prior to predication of a local object is an entangled symmetry-making state, and this entanglement is broken in the synthetic phase when the particular local object is constituted under the influence of an iota ('inner horizon') and the 'facticity' of the local world ('outer horizon'). Replacing 'perceptual cognition' by 'measurement' and 'subject' by 'expert subject using a measuring device' the analogy of a formal quantum structure is extended to the conscious structure of all empirical cognition. This is laid out in three theses: about perception, about classical measurement, and about quantum measurement. The results point to the need for research into the quantum structure of the physical embodiment of human cognition