Benedetta Spigola

In this paper, I will focus on Ernst Cassirer’s account of hypotheses in order to argue that: (1) Cassirer provides for two distinct concepts of hypotheses—the ontological and the operational concept of hypotheses; (2) these two concepts are based on two distinct views on how a hypothesis is introduced and developed in the available theory and, therefore, depend on a distinction in the epistemological theory; and (3) this account helps to explain what role the hypothesis of ether had in Albert Einstein’s development of the theory of special relativity and also gives systematicity to Einstein’s treatment of the idea of ether.

In this paper I focus on Cassirer’s functionalist theory of truth in order to argue that the Positivistic theory of knowledge fails to explain how it is that physics provides us with truth-evaluable and reliably objective descriptions of the world. This argument is based on Cassirer’s idea that what the Positivistic theory of knowledge normally considers as the “factual” of physics is, in fact, unachievable and falsely conceived. I show that Cassirer’s focus on how measurement is made possible, as well as how technological instruments are put to use in physical research, enables him to offer an alternative account of truth, i.e., a functionalist theory of truth, which is philosophically attractive and rationally plausible.

In this paper we discuss Cassirer’s interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave mechanics within the broader context of his account of the “crisis of intuition”. According to Cassirer, quantum mechanics challenged the extent to which the conceptual apparatus of physics could still be grounded in, or made adequate to, the Kantian forms of human intuition. After having introduced his account of the structure of physical theories – based on the distinction between statements of measurement, statements of laws and statements of principles and causal statements – we explain why he regarded Schrödinger’s wave mechanics as an attempt to eliminate certain ad hoc assumptions of the theory and to derive the quantum rules from the formal structure of quantum mechanics.