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The Law of Causality and Its Limits Vienna Circle Collection THE LAW OF CAUSALITY AND ITS LIMITS VIENNA CIRCLE COLLECTION lIENK L. MULDER, University ofAmsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University, Boston, Mass., U.SA. BRIAN MCGUINNESS, University of Siena, Siena, Italy RUDOLF IlALLER, Charles Francis University, Graz, Austria Editorial Advisory Board ALBERT E. BLUMBERG, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., U.SA. ERWIN N. HIEBERT, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.SA JAAKKO HiNTIKKA, Boston University, Boston, Mass., U.S.A. A. J. Kox, University ofAmsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands GABRIEL NUCHELMANS, University ofLeyden, Leyden, The Netherlands ANTH:ONY M. QUINTON, All Souls College, Oxford, England J. F. STAAL, University of California, Berkeley, Calif., U.SA. FRIEDRICH STADLER, Institute for Science and Art, Vienna, Austria VOLUME 22 VOLUME EDITOR: ROBERT S. COHEN PHILIPP FRANK PHILIPP FRANK THELAWOF CAUSALITY AND ITS LIMITS Edited by ROBERT s. COHEN Boston University Translated by MARIE NEURATH and ROBERT S. COHEN 1Ii.. ... ,~ SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Frank, Philipp, 1884-1966. [Kausalgesetz und seine Grenzen. Englishl The law of causality and its limits / Philipp Frank; edited by Robert S. Cohen ; translation by Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen. p. cm. -- (Vienna Circle collection ; v. 22) Inc I udes index. ISBN 978-94-010-6323-4 ISBN 978-94-011-5516-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5516-8 1. Causation. 2. Science--Phi losophy. I. Cohen, R. S. (Robert Sonne) 11. Title. 111. Series. BD543.F7313 1997 122--dc21 97-8414 ISBN 978-94-010-6323-4 Das Kausalgesetz und seine Grenzen (Springer-Verlag, Vienna, 1932) Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix DAS KAUSALGESETZ UND SEINE GRENZEN 1 Analytical Table of Contents 3 Preface by Philipp Frank (Prague, 1931) 11 I. The dangers of meaningless for statements of great generality 17 II. The most incisive formulation of the law of causality: Laplace's demand for a world-formula 43 III. Currents of thought hostile to causality 64 IV. Causality, finalism and vitalism 95 V. Physical lawfulness and causality 137 VI. Causality and chance 155 VII. Causality and quantum mechanics 161 VIII. Causality, chance or plan in the development of the world? 197 IX. Difficulties in the formulation of a general law of causality 218 X. On the so-called 'true' world 240 XI. On the validity of the law of causality 271 Notes 281 Bibliography of Philipp Frank 290 INDEX OF NAMES 297 vii ROBERTS. COHEN INTRODUCTION The Law of Causality and its Limits was the principal philosophical work of the physicist turned philosopher, Philipp Frank. Born in Vienna on March 20, 1884, Frank died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 21, 1966. He received his doctorate in 1907 at the University of Vienna in theoretical physics, having studied under Ludwig Boltzmann; his sub­ sequent research in physics and mathematics was represented by more than 60 scientific papers. Moreover his great success as teacher and expositor was recognized throughout the scientific world with publication of his collaborative Die Differentialgleichungen der Mechanik und Physik, with Richard von Mises, in 1925-27. Frank was responsible for the second volume, on physics, and especially noted for his authoritative article on classical Hamiltonian mechanics and optics. Among his earliest papers were those, beginning in 1908, devoted to special relativity, which together with general relativity and physical cosmology occupied him throughout his life. Already in 1907, Frank published his seminal paper 'Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung' ('Experience and the Law of Causality'), much later collected with a splendid selection of his essays on philosophy of science, in English (1941c and 1949g, in our Bibliography). Joining the first 'Vienna Circle' in the first decade of the 20th century, with Hans Hahn, mathematician, and Otto Neurath, sociologist and economist, and deeply influenced by studies of Ernst Mach's critical conceptual histories of science and by the striking challenge of Poincare and Duhem, Frank continued his epistemological investigations. He set for himself "to bring about the closest possible rapprochement between philosophy and science", and above all "to avoid the traditional ambiguity and obscurity of philoso­ phy". In 1912, upon Einstein's recommendation, Philipp Frank was appointed to the physics faculty at the (German language) University of Prague, as Einstein's successor, and in 1917 Frank was promoted to full Professor, and Director of the University'S Institute for Theoretical ix x ROBERTS. COHEN Physics. He continued his wider research interests beyond pure physics, and participated through the years of fundamental development of logical empiricism in the Vienna seminars of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap. Through Frank's efforts, a special faculty post was arranged for Carnap at the University of Prague in 1931. Frank, with his wife, left Prague in 1938 on a lecture tour in America, never to return to Czechoslovakia. German forces occupied that land, and had already taken power in Austria. The Schlick/Carnap circle, named the Vienna Circle by genial Otto Neurath, had scattered to the West, and Frank found an ongoing modest half-time Lectureship in physics and mathematics at Harvard University. He inspired and led a new Institute of the Unity of Science, a transplant in America, so it seemed, of the first Institute which had been established by Neurath in the Netherlands and soon removed to England (Neurath died in Oxford in 1945). Frank met his American environment with curiosity and courage. One Harvard physicist wrote of Frank: His was a gentle, unassuming spirit combined with a luminous mind and gifts of simplicity and humor that endeared him to all. He understood the nature of truth and the criteria that must be used to separate truth from mythology. He was a humanist as well as a scientist and philosopher ... he had the patience, the perception and the wit to make profound truths intelligible to a wide public. (B.C. Kemble) • The treatise on causality was written and published (1931) during the mature years of the Vienna Circle, to form a volume in a series of books on logic and the philosophy of science, and inclusive of studies on values, and sociological matters. How useful the logical empiricist analysis would be in achieving a 'scientific philosophy' is demonstrated in this book; as the reader will see, Frank clarifies both the strengths and the limitations of the full range of concepts that have been linked to 'causal' explanation, most fascinating perhaps in his analysis of misuse of the causal, by what he calls metaphysical misinterpretations. Among the historically significant topics in this book we have: the Laplacean determinism of global causal laws of nature; loss of causal simplicity with the establishment of field concepts; cause and chance, in classical, statistical-mechanical, and quantum physics; conservation laws and causal laws; the seeming irreversibility of natural processes; extremal principles; vitalist explanations as also causal; miracles and theological explanation; lawfulness in the phenomena of life; causal hypotheses in historical studies and sociology; causality and the understanding of INTRODUCTION xi Marxist dialectical expositions from the Soviet literature of the late 1920s; and the logical plus the psychological appreciation of the question of 'free will' as well as of the question of our knowledge of the real or (as Frank termed it) 'true' world. Of Philipp Frank's life work in the philosophy of science, we may say, with his younger colleague at the Vienna Circle, Herbert Feigl, that "it combines informal logical analysis of the sciences (and their formal mathematical structures) with a vivid awareness of the psychological and social-cultural factors operating in the selection of problems, and the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses, and which contribute to the shaping of styles of scientific theorizing". * Several brief remarks may focus Frank's evaluations of so much that had gone before, and still prevails in European culture. In his historical considerations of traditional philosophies, he concludes that they plainly preserve the residue of obsolete scientific theories, at their best; for the desire to know the 'true' world, he sees motives derived from an animistic­ theological base. But at a higher level, Frank examines the use of analogies, perhaps legitimate, perhaps not, in scientific explanations, as in his respectful account of Bergson's appeal to feeling and instinct for the understanding of "the ancestral history of organisms". Indeed, Frank says admiringly of Bergson's Creative Evolution (p. 84) that we "could believe we are reading a genuine psychological novel of development". And yet he is careful in criticizing, for we are not scientifically in command of the phenomena of "strivings and tendencies". Indeed from the materialistic Age of Englightenment, Frank selects for critique the blunt argument for teleology from Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary: If a clock is not made in order
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