L. Susan Stebbing, CEM Joad, and Philipp Frank on the Philosophy Of

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Knowledge Missemination: L. Susan Stebbing, C.E.M. Joad, and Philipp Frank on the Philosophy of the Physicists

Adam Tamas Tuboly Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, University of Pecs

Science popularization might take different forms. In the early twentieth century, Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington presented the most successful endeavors. Philosophers were highly unimpressed and disturbed by these popular works and various authors declared their disagreement with the physicists’ philosophical books against their own philosophical background. I will discuss three different philosophers, L. Susan Stebbing, C. E. M. Joad, and Philipp Frank, whose three lines of criticism represent three different forms of philosophy, social engagement, and scientiﬁc outlook. What is interesting is that there was a point when the most diverse philosophers (of science) agreed in contrast of their common enemy, namely, those popularizing scientists that have their reputation and use it to propagate false, or at least misleading views about science, culture, and values. What we shall see is how far this agreement went among these ﬁgures and how the divergent strategies culminated in very similar results regarding knowledge dissemination.

Keywords: Susan Stebbing, Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, philosophy of physics, popularization of science, C.E.M. Joad, Philipp Frank, logical empiricism

The paper was ﬁrst presented at the Matter and Life: Historico-logical Issues in Post-1800 Physics and Biology workshop (Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, 27. 08. 2018). I am indebted to Bohang Chen, Maarten van Dyck and Charles T. Wolfe. I am also grateful to George Reisch for the many discussions on Frank’s philosophy, the two anonymous reviewers of the journal and to Alexander Levine and Michael Whitworth for their kindness and help. I was supported by the MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group and by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Research Scholarship.

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1. Introduction: Setting the Scene In their major work, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2010, p. 5) expressed the opinion of presumably many working physicists, philosophers of physics and even educated laymen when they said, “philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” Their examples of the fields that have been conquered by physicists include most of the perennial philosophical questions: “what is the nature of the world”, “how can we understand the world,” “where did we come from,”“how did the universe come into existence.” Due to numerous disruptions that shocked the relations between philosophy, science, and society, physicists became able (or were recognized by many as being able) to produce better and more fruitful answers to all those ancient questions that philosophers were never able to handle in a satisfactory manner. One of the main lessons of Hawking and Mlodinow’s book is not simply that they try to disqualify philosophical questions, but that they are even allowed and able to play the role of such experts and public intellectuals whose opinion has to be carefully listened to outside the physical sciences as well. While contemporary physicists tend to claim that philosophy is dead and what most philosophers do is just harmful gibberish, the first half of the twentieth century experienced a rather different attitude. Respectful physicists, after their theoretical investigations were done, tended to produce such philosophical works that aimed at setting the stage for the discussion on science, its results, and its relation to society. Perhaps the most well-known examples from the early twentieth century are Sir James Jeans’ and Sir Arthur Eddington’s popularizing work on the philosophical or general consequences of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Jeans and Eddington, despite being heavily debated by their contemporaries, have shown that popular writing could matter during the disruption of Science and the soaring development of scientific disciplines. “Those who could do it successfully were in a position to influence the public’s perception of science whether or not they were reflecting a consensus of the scientific community” (Bowler 2009, p. 34). After the 1920s and 1930s, trained philosophers and physicist-turned- philosophers entered the scene. In this paper, I will reconstruct and discuss three widely different, though related, criticisms of Jeans and Eddington. L. Susan Stebbing, in her book, Philosophy and the Physicists ([1937] 1944), criticized Jeans and Eddington from a philosophical point of view, but based her insights mainly on the clarity of thinking and the preciseness of presentation, that is, on the theory and method of communication utilizing also her own theoretical arguments. The notorious popularizer, C.E.M. Joad often wrote about the intersections of philosophy and science for a broader audience of educated laymen. He attacked the physicists not for pursuing metaphysics per se, but

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for propagating an erroneous metaphysics and for neglecting values in science and human life. Finally, the logical empiricist Philipp Frank criticized the physicists from the viewpoint of his positivist philosophy of science and argued for a somewhat neutral though socially sensitive reading of science. The three lines of criticism represent three different forms of philosophy, social engagement, and scientific outlook. Nonetheless, all of the abovemen- tioned scholars considered the newest results of science to be of utmost importance for society and held that the knowledge dissemination strategies of scientists have to be chosen carefully. If not, even the best intentions could turn into—to say somewhat idiosyncratically—knowledge missemination, that is, into a misleading form of presenting scientific theories, especially in relation to society and human values. In the paper, I am not concerned with the specific arguments of the physicists, namely whether particular physical theories indeed have those effects and consequences that the physicists attributed to them or not, or with the particular theoretical remarks of the philosophers. That is, I am not interested in the questions whether Frank, Stebbing, and Joad have produced better arguments than the physicists, and whether they were indeed able to point out the alleged deficien- cies of the physicists’ argumentation. Missemination is only partially tied to invalid arguments and faulty reasoning, but overall, it is the outcome of a more general way of presentation and engagement with the given subject. What I am after now is thus simply the general outlook of the philosophers, their strategies, and how their projects fit their bigger narratives. What is interesting is that there was a point when, or a platform where, the most diverse philosophers (of science)—who are usually conceived to be diametrically opposed—agreed in opposition to their common enemy. That enemy consisted of those popularizing scientists who had their reputation and used it to propagate false, or at least misleading views about science, culture, and values. What we shall see here is how far this agreement went among these philosophers and how the divergent strategies culminated in very similar results regarding knowledge dissemination. I shall reconstruct three different forms of philosophical practice and worldview, pointing out their possible intersections. From this perspective, my claims have to be much more historical and modest than a purely philosophical investigation is supposed to be. One final introductory note is in place. The whole issue is a pretty complex matter, thus any attempt to deal with this mazy web of scholars and works in such a short paper as this might not amount to more than just a diffident scratching of the surface. Early twentieth century British science writing was a rapidly flourishing scene with its own social and scientific context. Besides Jeans’ and Eddington’s writings on physics, the market- place was filled with the popular and engaging books of J. B. Haldane,

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Lancelot Hogben, Julian Huxley, J. Arthur Thomson, and H. G. Wells. Keeping up the relation with the public, communicating the latest theoretical ideas of science and drawing a thrilling picture of how science enters daily life and shapes our attitude towards it were thus significant concerns of many.1 Regarding philosophy in particular, before and after the publication of Jeans’ and Eddington’s works, many conferences and symposiums were devoted to the question of how philosophy may be influenced by the new physics, and whether physicists shall learn any lessons from the new scientific philosophies. Some of the already well-established figures that acted on the borders of philosophy and science had their say in these debates (like Bertrand Russell who reviewed almost all the relevant works of Jeans and Eddington), some others kept silent (like C. D. Broad who might be considered a leading scientific philosopher, among others, with his book on Sci- entific Thought [1927]), and there were, of course, all the relatively unknown but fresh candidates. Choosing the three figures that will be presented here might be considered somewhat ad hoc, but I hope to show that there is such a narrative that could bind the diverging lines into a coherent story.

2. New Physics, New Idealist Philosophy Around the turn of the twentieth century, British philosophical and religious thought was occupied with a speciﬁc form of German idealism, called British Idealism. While in philosophical circles (even at the univer- sities) the praising voices faded away around the 1930s (Mander 2011), physicists have just then discovered and embraced these approaches in semi-popular forms and presentations.2 Perhaps the two most well-known scientists are Sir James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington. Jeans was a mathematician, a physicist, and the founder of British cosmology with Eddington. He was known among scientists for various theoretical results and for wide-ranging hypotheses, though most of them (like the one about the steady state character of the universe) have been dropped later. While he produced many important theoretical works on gases, electricity, and mechanism, his major accomplishment in the public discourse came after his retirement in 1929. Jeans started to publish popularizing works on the recent discoveries of physics and their relation to philosophical matters. His most important works include The

1. For the details and general context of popular writings on science (especially in Britain), see Whitworth 1996, 2001; Bowler 2009. 2. Of course, not just physicists, but also mathematicians and biologists embraced various forms of idealism and tried to show that idealism and modern science do not contradict each other in principle (see Mander 2011, pp. 547–50).

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Stars in Their Courses (1931), The New Background of Science (1933) and The Mysterious Universe (1930). Eddington was one of the most famous physicists during the interwar period, and all the philosophers discussed in this paper took him actually more seriously. Jeans (1930, p. vii) proudly emphasized from time to time that he is not a philosopher and thus he is even more qualified and unbi- ased to express his opinion about philosophical matters. As it goes without saying, no one from the philosophers’ side accepted this reasoning. Eddington was working mainly on astrophysics, as the director of Cambridge Observa- tory, but made important contributions to nuclear fusion and its relation to stellar energy. The most well-known works of his are concerned with the theory of relativity. It was Eddington who introduced and tried to propagate Einstein’s theory in the English speaking community. In 1919, he con- ducted and designed an experiment at the time of the solar eclipse that was considered by many as a proof of general relativity. As a national hero, possessing also the Order of Merit, Eddington put a lot of effort into popularizing the newest scientific results. Due to his detailed works in the area, he is often counted as a philosopher of science.3 Eddington, like Jeans, was well known outside the physics community. Due to his confirmation of Einstein’s theory, he became a well-known scholar whose views were discussed (though usually not accepted) by philosophers. His reputation went so far that in 1931 Norman Campbell, who also wrote an important philosophically informed account of the new physics, claimed that “[f]or many philosophers, and for most journalists and novelists, modern physics is simply what Sir Arthur Eddington says” (1931, p. 181). Eddington’s famous 1927 Gifford lectures were published one year later as The Nature of the Physical World, and the book immediately became a groundbreaking success, having at least five impressions within one year, and it was reprinted more than five times within the forthcoming decades. Jeans produced similar numbers with his The Mysterious Universe that was reprinted more than fifteen times until 1938. Actually, more than 20,000 copies were sold from Eddington’s book between 1928 and 1938, while more than 100,000 copies were printed from Jeans’ book within two years (Whitworth 1996, pp. 67, 71).4

3. On the eclipse-experiment and its political dimension, see Stanley 2003; on Eddington’s life see Douglas 1956; on Eddington’s philosophy of science see, e.g., Ryckman (2005, ch. 7). 4. Compare these numbers to, for example, A. N. Whitehead’s popular Science and the Modern World, which was also a successful book, but less than 15.000 copies were printed within ﬁve years (Whitworth 1996, p. 63). Numbers in themselves though shall not convey any substantial idea. As Michael Whitworth has noted, “there are many reasons for [Jeans’s] success: the lucidity of Jeans’s exposition was essential, but price, marketing and reviews were also crucially important” (1996, p. 68).

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Jeans and Eddington did not agree on all matters regarding philosophy and the interpretation of physical theories. To give an example, one such theme of disagreement was the nature and place of God in the universe given the interpretation of the new physics, which claims that the allegedly more mathematical toolkit of physics opened up the possibility of a more subjective and spiritual governor of the world. While Eddington stopped at this point (as a Quaker, he emphasized the subjective and internal characterization of religious experience about God), Jeans went further and explicitly claimed that it is the Almighty God that is shown through mathematical physics (Bowler 2001, Ch. 3.). Nonetheless, they were often put in the same idealist box, and thus they were discussed under similar headings and categories. That does not mean, however, that they were treated with the same detailed manner; both Joad and Stebbing started with Jeans and moved on to consider Eddington in the remaining three quarters of their books. While Stebbing (1943, p. 168) noted in the 1940s that Jeans would not accept the philosophical conclusions that Eddington drew from physical theories (thus some dif- ferences between the physicists came to the surface in time), the fact that their names appeared on the same pages and titles had the lasting psychological impact that Jeans and Eddington stand on the same platform in all their details that really matter. While their difference is acknowledged, I will not present a refined and revised version of their divergences, as they do not interfere with my general points about their reception. Jeans and Eddington (in their own respective ways) believed that science does not reveal the world as it really is since what seems to be a mind- independent reality is just appearance, thus the realm of our knowledge is a creation of the human mind. As Jeans claimed in his presidential address of the British Association published in Nature, “our minds can only be acquainted with things inside themselves—never with things outside. Thus, we can never know the essential nature of anything […] which exists in that mysterious world outside ourselves to which our minds can never penetrate” (Jeans 1934, p. 356). Because of how physics refined our concepts and put back the mental element into the flow of the world, Jeans formulated the point, “the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter […] we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter” (1930, p. 148). This governor was God and it is God the great mathematician whose thoughts we are part of. Although science seems to reveal the world to us, in fact, the new physical theories show us that the universe consists merely of mental entities, idealistically conceived happenings.5

5. In a late symposium, Jeans reﬁned his position by claiming that it is meaningless to say that the world of experience consist merely of mental or material stuff. “Just as light is

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This way of revising the well-received pictures of former scientific theories, but – and more importantly – also of the common sense view of the world is well documented by Eddington’s famous passage about his tables: I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me – two tables, two chairs, two pens. One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. […] It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial. […] Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned – that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes […]. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. […] There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space – space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force, but these are assigned to the category of “influences,” not of “things.” (Eddington 1928, pp. ix–xi.) This agitated picture about how our familiar world is just one next to another that reflects a fragile, sparse structure revealed by science, became highly influential both in negative and positive terms. Eddington’s peculiarity might be grasped by how and for what he used this picture. Though revisiting the common sense picture of our environment might be a quite typical or normal philosophical venture, the English scene did not appreciate Eddington’s efforts to reach idealistic conclusions from the above tensions. While Eddington seems to argue for the fundamentality of scientific achievements over our bare everyday experiences, there were others who used very similar similes and pictures but for entirely different reasons.6

neither corpuscular nor undulatory, but has corpuscular and some undulatory aspects, so the world of our experience is neither material nor mental, but has some material and some mental aspects; these are not attributes of the universe, but of our perceiving minds” (Jeans 1943, p. 201). Jeans thus defended a certain aspect-theory of the world that had at its base, after all, a mental underpinning by the perceiving mind. As he admitted in the paper, “perhaps Spinoza came nearest” to this conception. 6. While Stebbing and many others read Eddington as someone who tried to radically re- interpret the common sense world in theoretical terms of the new physics, it has to be added that in the conclusion of his Nature of the Physical World, Eddington seemingly claimed the opposite. That is, he argued that only after the quantum revolution (the mid-1920s) could religion ﬁrst

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The Berlin-based logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach, for example, claimed that scientists’“expert scientific work is an exponent of a tendency of the age. But the specialist does not need to know this; even without any conscious contribution on his part, his mathematical or experimental work itself leads toward a new conception of the world” (1932, p. 21; emphasis added). Eddington was surely aware of his own contribution to the physical field in particular, and he was surely aware of the revolutionary contribution of his physical results to questions of life in general. Reichenbach (1932, pp. 21–3) knew this too, and he tried to diminish the friction (in a very popular fashion in his radio broadcast lecture, Atom and Cosmos from 1930) between the scientific and the everyday picture instead of putting too much metaphysical weight on any of the two. Nonetheless, Eddington and Jeans were quite determined. Destroying the usual mechanistic-machine picture of the world that was propagated between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, Jeans and Eddington formulated new metaphors, analogies, and similes. Eddington thought, for example, that the world consists of “mind-stuff” (1928, pp. 276–7), that are “not spread in space and time [but] are part of the cyclic scheme ulti- mately derived out of it.” There are many more interesting theses to be discussed in this context; this is especially true of Eddington who worked out many details of his idealist-structuralist conception (French 2003) with its Kantian roots — Thomas Ryckman (2005) called his conception transcendental idealism. I will move forward, however, to the critics as they show a great amount of difference on their side and document various philosophical conceptions that were unified, after all, only by their negative attitude towards the knowledge missemination of the physicists.

3. L. Susan Stebbing – Method and Inexact Communication L. Susan Stebbing studied in Cambridge, but she went to finish her studies at King’s College at London since women were not able to obtain a degree at Cambridge during the early 1910s (on Stebbing’slifeandworkssee Chapman 2013; Beaney and Chapman 2017). Later she became the first female professor in Great Britain. Stebbing played a significant role in the history of philosophy in England as she wrote the first extensive monograph

become “possible for a reasonable scientiﬁc man.” Furthermore, “if we must consider that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man, we may point out that not merely religion but most of the ordinary aspects of life ﬁrst became possible for him in that year [of 1927]” (Eddington 1928, p. 350). This and similar passages could indeed be read as a claim to vindicate the common sense world through the new physics, but presumably Stebbing and others would be anxious whether such reasoning in that form worth the money.

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on symbolic logic (Stebbing 1930) and produced a few more popular and influential accounts of the subject in the forthcoming decade. Besides playing a decisive role during the formation of British analytic philosophy (in the generation of philosophers after G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell), Stebbing was effective in bringing logical empiricism and logical empiricists themselves to Cambridge and London. She knew Schlick from the 1930 International Congress of Philosophy and from London where Schlick lectured in 1932; she invited Carnap to London to de- liver his lectures on philosophy and logical syntax in 1934. Stebbing had a good relation to Neurath as well as she was a member of the organizing com- mittees of the congresses for the unity of science. When Neurath was impri- soned in 1940 on the Isle of Man, Stebbing sent a lawyer to get him and Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) out of prison. Neurath later wrote to Carnap that they became “best friends” with Stebbing, and she became the first director of Neurath’s Isotype Institute in England.7 This does not mean, however, that their philosophical relation was balanced. Stebbing wrote to Schlick that her sympathies in matters of philosophy are with him rather than with Carnap and Neurath.8 She indeed criticized Carnap for his principle of tolerance and Neurath for his alleged coherence theory of truth. Nonetheless, she argued (somewhat against Schlick) that philosophical analysis touches upon not just the questions of language but of facts as well. So instead of particular philosophical theses, Stebbing agreed with the majority of logical empiricists only in their general approach towards clarity, preciseness and the logically conceived ideal of rationality. Another common issue was the public engagement of science and philosophy. As it was shown recently (Romizi 2012), logical empiricists had a very detailed and complex relation to public and adult education. The scientific world-conception, propagated especially by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath ([1929] 1973), was not just a philosophical/theoretical idea, but it was such a socio-political approach that aimed at the emancipation of the laymen, enabling them to forge their own values and base their decisions on these values and webs of beliefs, instead of propaganda and party-political deception. Through Neurath, Stebbing was perhaps aware of this type of mission from Vienna, and thus the socially engaged approach of logical empiricists might be another common point between her and her continental colleagues.

7. Neurath to Carnap, 25 September, 1943, letter 22 (Cat and Tuboly 2019, p. 584). On Neurath and Stebbing see Körber (2019); on Stebbing and logical empiricism in general see Chapman (2013, ch. 5). 8. Stebbing to Schlick, 11 January 1935, Moritz Schlick Nachlass.

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Stebbing always acted, for example, as a kind of philosophical public intellectual and attacked the popular writings of politicians, lawyers, public intellectuals, and scientists (Stebbing 1939a). In her 1937 seminal book, Philosophy and the Physicists (having popular Pelican and Dover editions as well), two of her major targets were Jeans and Eddington.9 She had various motivations to become an actor in this debate: as Jeans and Eddington were among the most well-known and widely read intellectuals of England, it was of utmost importance to deal with their views. On the other hand, as both of them admitted that they express philosophical thoughts in their books, a philosopher’s response was indeed required. Al- though it would be an important question to ask how the public intellectual and scientific expert character of physicists in the twentieth century emerged, I shall only note—with Stebbing—that especially after Einstein’s theory and its British confirmation by Eddington, physical discoveries and results often ended up as newspaper headlines and were disseminated in popular books. Thus the ideas of theoretical scientists left the seminar rooms and highly abstract society journals and entered the field of public discussions. Stebbing was quite aware of the phenomenon that scientists and philosophers might influence public discourse and therefore they could have a certain responsibility in everyday life and in ordering the conduct of citizens. If popularizing scientists (or journalists) mislead public opinion, the consequences could be dramatic. Bad and misleading popularization “ob- fuscates the common reader whilst pretending to enlighten him” (Stebbing [1937] 1944, p. 22) and thus makes him/her vulnerable to the distorting decision-making influence of biased members of the public. As she wrote in a short paper about the practical usage of logic a few years before, It is a good plan to encourage students to read reports, and comments, in different newspapers of the same occurrence. It is desirable to show them how, after a little practice, they will themselves be able to recognize the political bias of the writer from the mode of his statements. This is extremely useful as a protective against insidious propaganda. (Stebbing 1936, p. 23.) As a philosopher, interested in the business of language and knowledge, Stebbing’s main concern was a linguistic and communicational one: how

9. Stebbing actually wrote a succinct summary for the American audience, see (Stebbing 1937). Peter J. Bowler has noted that “there were local circumstances that encouraged British scientists to keep up the Victorian tradition of communicating with the public, circumstances that did not obtain on the other side of the Atlantic” (2009, p. 3). Thus Stebbing’s paper, designed especially for the American reader might be read undermoresubstantiallightsaswell.

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to present and popularize scientific results with the least misleading effects. By calling attention to how scientists overstep the boundaries of the field they are entitled to occupy by their empirical observations, Stebbing aimed at challenging the unlimited authority of scientists.10 Her approach was based on two main pillars: common-sense realism and the ordinary usage of language. Stebbing distinguished between “the world of physics” and “the physical world” and accused Eddington of con- fusing them. “The former is to be found only in physics; it is the work of scientists;” wrote Stebbing, its form changes as fashions of thinking change and in accordance with the discoveries of the experimentalists. The latter, the physical world or Nature, is that which physics is about, and other sciences also are concerned with it. This does not change; there is no reason to suppose that this is created by physicists. (Stebbing [1937] 1944, p. 208; original emphases.) As a common-sense realist, Stebbing tried to block those inferences that run from working theoretical models to the world of bare experiences. As our theoretical vocabulary and ordinary vocabulary differs, the danger lies in transposing them. Take the following example of Eddington (next to his famous “two tables”) when he attempts to explain the atomic theory of matter and its effect on our worldview: I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the ﬁrst place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank traveling at twenty miles a second round the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. […] The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of ﬂies. Shall I not slip through? (Eddington 1928, p. 328.) Using such literary style formulations of the problems that stretch the scientific and the everyday image apart might be innocent in themselves,

10. In a joint symposium with Stebbing and Jeans, the English philosopher of science Richard Braithwaite (1943, p. 203) also emphasized that by using such words that do not occur normally in the vocabulary of their theoretical vocabulary (“mental” and “material”), physicists “are no longer speaking as physicists but as philosophers”; thus, they are made accountable by philosophers. It would be worthwhile to consider the narratives of philosophically inclined scientists and philosophers about how they explain their role and what enables them either to pursue philosophy as physicists in the age of specialization (at a time when philosophers were thought to be unable to understand modern scientiﬁc philosophy while scientists could obviously philosophize) or criticize scientiﬁc theories as armchair philosophers.

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relying too much on them and taking their wording literally might be dangerous.11 Stebbing often reﬂected on this problem and thus she formulated her own experience of how one usually enters a room: I enter my study and see the blue curtains ﬂuttering in the breeze, for the windows are open. I notice a bowl of roses on the table; it was not there when I went out. Clumsily I stumble against the table, bruising my leg against its hard edge; it is a heavy table and scarcely moves under the impact of my weight. I take a rose from the bowl, press it to my face, feel the softness of the petals, and smell its characteristic scent. I rejoice in the beauty of the graded shading of the crimson petals. In short—I am in a familiar room, seeing, touching, smelling, familiar things, thinking familiar thoughts, experiencing familiar emotions. (Stebbing [1937] 1944, p. 40.) Stebbing’s experience is that of the general reader who knows her surroundings well, finds her way easily in the physical environment, and needs perhaps only cultural and intellectual guidance through the biased ways of politics, culture and social life. And this complex web of statements, obligations, permissions, and wishes is just getting further complicated by Eddington due to his ambiguous metaphors, misleading analogies and obfuscate line of presentation. Stebbing hence thought that most people, outside their working place and seminar rooms, seem to agree generally in the observable content and character of their everyday experiences. Thus if you take your views of the unobservable world (that has its competing theories of its own) and you simply transpose its qualities and categories without further ado to the sphere of bare human experience, you might force an entirely new “world,” or at least an effective picture of it upon the well-known and familiar environment. These pictures are usually called “metaphysical theories,” and

11. This literary style was not alien to Reichenbach (1932, p. 22) either. He wrote the following when describing the scientific picture: “Here the uniformly filled substance of the naïve picture exists no longer; instead, there is really nothing but tiny granules, which whirl past each other in violent motion. The quiet, clear water in the lake, as the scientist conceives it, corresponds rather to a swarm of gnats, all swirling to and fro; there is no surface, but only a vague frontier zone, from which water particles are ever shooting into the air, while others come through this zone from the atmosphere. Even the bridge pier of iron, which rises from the water and seems a symbol of repose and sustaining strength, reveals itself to the closer observer as a quivering structure, whose particles tremble in con- fusion, like the fine ramifications of a panicle of elderberries; indeed, these particles are not held together by form connection, but are bound exclusively by the mutual force of attrac- tion at a distance.” Nonetheless, as it was noted above before, Reichenbach did not draw any metaphysically inspired new picture of the real world based on the apparent tension between experience and theory, but only aimed to show that there are some difficulties around science and common sense that might prompt a new understanding of science.

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they might consist of physically unwarranted assumptions about the world. By utilizing the propagated metaphysics, scientists could deny certain elements of the world (that do not fit their made-up world-pictures) and thus proclaim certain values in the name of the fundamental approach that finally reaches the world as it is, contrary to the preceding deceptions. “The danger arises,” as Stebbing ([1937] 1944, p. 45) concludes later, “when the scientist uses the picture for the purpose of making explicit denials, and expresses these denials in common-sense language used in such a way as to be devoid of sense.” Stebbing called the reader’s attention to the paradigmatic cases and well- established meanings of words. She ([1937] 1944, p. 45) claimed that in order to misuse certain expressions, there has to “some correct and literal usages.”“There is no common usage of language that provides a meaning for the word ‘solid’ that would make sense to say that the plank on which I stand is not solid” (original emphasis). If the expression “non-solid” is meaningful and the plank is non-solid, as Eddington claims, then “solid” has to be meaningful as well. If the expression “solid” is meaningful, then what could be solid, if not a plank? Our ordinary language and our common-sense field of experience prevent such statements as “the plank is non-solid.” The problem behind Eddington’s procedure is that he aims at conveying exact thoughts in an inexact language, and that, according to Stebbing, is an impossible task. By detecting numerous fallacies, like the anthropomorphic fallacy of personifying science and nature, by noting when the reader’semo- tional frame of mind was addressed, and by displaying passage by passage those points where the authors counted on an intuitive and ambiguous understanding of notions, Stebbing’s book might serve as a perfect reading guide to informal logic, critical thinking, and ordinary language analysis of the philosophy of science. She ([1937] 1944, p. 80; 1937, p. 75) calls our attention to the fact that Eddington uses all the expressions of “the familiar world,”“the external world,”“the scientific world,”“the physical world,”“Nature,”“the world of physics,”“the spiritual world.” While we do not get clear definitions of these notions—even though intuitively they seem to differ—Eddington jumps from one to the other without explicit warning of the possible dangers of mixing up the qualities of these fields. This is inexcusable for Stebbing, and it is a clear sign of intellectual dishon- esty, a degrading move of mistreating one’s readers. But Stebbing knew that besides producing a short guide to debunk Jeans and Eddington, which was presumably not much more than just a fruitful exercise for her, further justification and explanation might be in order to persuade her possible readers at the end of the book that all the time that they spent on reading it was well placed. In the final section, she thus raises the problem of what difference it makes for ordinary people

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whether the world is there, whether it is created by us or by God (that is, whether scientists or non-scientists are right about these questions), especially if “men are capable of making a hell upon earth even though they can envisage something better” (Stebbing [1937] 1944, p. 212). If our current experience shows a pessimistic and sorrowful state, it should not be connected to the actual state and the metaphysical connotations of physical sciences. It lies within our power we so desire, to make the familiar world we inhabit more worthy of habitation by beings who aspire to be rational and are capable of love. Our limitation is due not to ignorance, not to the “blind forces of Nature,” not to the astronomical insigniﬁcance of our planet, but the feebleness of our desires for good. This limitation is not to be removed by the advances of physical knowledge, nor should our hopes be placed in the researches of the physicist. (Stebbing [1937] 1944, p. 212.) Thus our life in society, our behavior towards others and our chosen values should not be determined by and concerned with the contingent results and presentations of physical sciences. Eddington, by joining the campaign of idealists and Platonists, implicitly adopted certain values and suggestions as well, while his arguments for those relied purely on the contingent results of physics and a particular misuse of language. Our hopes should not be placed in physicists, but rather in ourselves and in our ability to behave politely and in a tolerant manner. It is quite hard to miss this picture’s similarities to Neurath’s notorious sociology of happiness. (Actually Stebbing [1939b] wrote longer reviews about popular ethical/religious books as well, exer- cising the same critical attitude that was present in the works about the philosophy of physics.) Many, even among logical empiricists, recognized Stebbing’spoint about the public authority of physicists. While Philipp Frank ([1946] 1971, p. 503) only mentioned Stebbing’s book in his Encyclopedia monograph on the foundations of physics among the recommended literature, Stebbing frequently referred to Frank’s works. It was Neurath, however, who connected some dots for their friends. In 1944, he tried to convince Bernhard Reichenbach (a communist refugee in London, and the brother of Hans Reichenbach) that there are many physicists who still pursue some speciﬁc form of Platonic metaphysics. Though his major example is the quantum physicist Walter Heitler, he mentions Jeans and Eddington and adds that “Susan Stebbing wrote a book against them.”12 The book was so important for Neurath that a year later he sent a copy of Stebbing’s

12. Otto Neurath to Bernhard Reichenbach, April/May 1944, Otto Neurath Nachlass.

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booklet to Reichenbach. For Neurath, all the metaphysically inclined physicists “produce this terrible Blab-Blab for many years” but the main problem was their power! “Susan thought the physicists most dangerous, because they have a certain PRESTIGE even in circles, where Metaphysi- cians and Spiritualists have no Prestige. I should be very glad if you would find the time to read FRANK and STEBBING.”13 Neurath claimed, presumably under the influence of Oxford anthropol- ogist Reginald Radcliff-Brown who invited him to lecture at Oxford, that he looks at “the Magicians of a Siberian tribe and Husserl as people made of the same atavistic stuff, producing a peculiar folklore. […] Jeans, Eddington, Planck, Schroedinger are the bearer of an atavistic folklore [too].”14 The peculiar problem with the physicists who pursued metaphysics was not—or not only—the fact that they pursued metaphysics, but that they had such a social status and role that should have encouraged them to be more careful and cautious. Stebbing also knew this and she “thought it unavoidable to give a thoroughly criticism of Jeans, Eddington and the other famous physicists” as Neurath wrote. Their joint hope was that anyone who reads Stebbing’s book (and the papers of Frank) would be “suspicious in the whole, whenever Physicists speak about anything but Physics.”15 Stebbing’s book, having various editions, was widely read in her own time, and even years after her death when the Second World War was over. James R. Newman (1950, p. 104) in his article about the twenty good examples of how to popularize science, named Stebbing’s book as a “bril- liant polemic” in 1950. During the 1930s, Stebbing’s book had just come out, and reviews of it followed quickly, by, among others, the logical empiricists Ernest Nagel (1938), the scientific philosopher C. D. Broad (1938), and Cecil Delisle Burns (1938), a well-known English public intellectual and moral thinker.16 The many reviews of her book testify to the

13. Otto Neurath to Bernhard Reichenbach, 3 February 1945, Otto Neurath Nachlass. Original emphases. 14. Otto Neurath to Bernhard Reichenbach, 3 February 1945, Otto Neurath Nachlass. 15. Otto Neurath to Bernhard Reichenbach, 3 February 1945, Otto Neurath Nachlass. 16. Although Broad wrote a quite positive review of Stebbing, I will not deal here with those ﬁgures that engaged with the debate only at the level of short reviews. That is why there isn’t any longer treatment of the logical empiricist Ernest Nagel who reviewed not just Stebbing’s book but also Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World in 1930 and his The Philosophy of Physical Science in 1940 (see Nagel 1954). Though Nagel got on the side of Stebbing, admiring her technique of showing how ethics and religion is independent from scientiﬁc results, and declared Eddington’s approach to be “misleading and perverse” (Nagel 1938, p. 334), to spell out his role in America as a popularizer on the pages of The Journal of Philosophy would require more space.

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very broad interest in her analytic skills in bringing down Eddington’s worldview brick by brick. One of the most interesting reviews of Stebbing’s book was published by the famous Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, who wrote a five-page long essay in the prestigious Hungarian journal Athenaeum.17 Lakatos mentioned some of Stebbing’s arguments and welcomed her contribution to the fight against idealism. There was a good reason, though, behind Lakatos’ review: he was quite critical towards Stebbing as well! He thought that Stebbing had only attacked the explicit arguments and philosophical presuppositions of Jeans and Eddington. “She did not even try to understand Jeans,” said Lakatos. What he meant by this is a sort of Marxist- sociological approach towards the physicists. As Jeans was “incomprehen- sible,”“surprising” for Stebbing, “the debate became scholastic and sterile since from that intellectual ground from which Jeans was born, new Jeans- variants might rise. The real ‘debate’ in this case would be to search for the existential position of the contrary opinion and to materially eliminate it” (Lakatos 1946, p. 29). That is, in order to prevent physicists, philosophers, and the laymen from accepting and pursuing idealism, we have to overcome those social, economic and political dimensions that make people more inclined to consider idealism as a viable option. According to Lakatos, the feeling that one is left to her own resources in a wild and hostile world filled with ungrasp- able and fearful distances (as Jeans said) is the documentation or expression of the loneliness that pervades individuals in the oppressive capitalist social world. Change the social order and you change the worldview of the people as well—as Lakatos conveyed the Marxist idea. We do not find anything like that in the case of Stebbing—neither in her physicists book nor in her other writings. She was always concerned with the wellbeing of people; with the idea that people should be made able to discuss their wishes and fight for their rights and with the emancipation of the oppressed classes. Nonetheless, this concern expressed itself mainly in her logical writings, in the ideal that people should think clearly, shall see through the misconceived arguments, fallacies, and ambiguous notions that find an easy way through their emotions to their decisions. Lakatos saw this clearly. In his view, Stebbing aimed at “taking out the natural sciences from the debate of materialism and idealism and to ascend them thus from that field that was infected with social struggles.” Butthisaim

17. The reception of Stebbing’s book, however, had a more negative line as well. Many people argued that her book is a troublesome undertaking as it has a simple negative conclusion and her only aim was painful and merciless destruction. On this line of criticism, see Chapman 2013, pp. 115–19.

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of disposing of the social struggle and the argumentation and understanding that comes with it expresses also a social determinateness and position. Lakatos (1946, p. 33) said that “Stebbing’s own position is determined socially, furthermore, it is determined from such a point of view that does not make it possible to see through the entire reality: this is the situation of the radical petty bourgeois.” Instead of taking a stand in the materialism-idealism debate, Stebbing has rather taken a step back. But her neutrality was perhaps motivated by her rejection of the classical formulations of metaphysical dualism versus monism. As she claimed in a symposium about the late works of Jeans, “the new physics does not imply idealism. Neither, however, does it imply materialism. It does not make sense to say that whatever is mental really is material,orthatwhateverismaterielreally is mental” (Stebbing 1943, p. 184; original emphases). Emphasizing social values, human determinateness, and a broader context for the analysis of physical sciences was a major concern of another English philosopher before Stebbing, namely C. E. M. Joad.

4. C. E. M. Joad—Objectivity, Values, and the Needs of Society C. E. M. Joad attacked Jeans and Eddington for their dangerous views on philosophical matters. Though his campaign was not mainstreamed into the canon of philosophy, it still has some lessons and interesting notes for our story, especially as he was related to the other figures in it. Joad was an important and well-known Oxford educated English philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote dozens of popularizing books on ethics, philosophy and their relation to contemporary issues, and was known for many as a broadcasting personality. As an ardent pacifist and socialist, he often ended up on the same platform with Bertrand Russell, though as A. J. Ayer (1978, pp. 301–2) claimed, “Russell had a very low opinion of Joad,” and even accused him implicitly and indirectly with general plagiarism. Joad was a dividing personality. During World War Two, he was one of the three original members of BBC’s more than successful program, entitled The Brains Trust. The weekly broadcast started in 1941, with Joad, the biologist Julian Huxley, and Commander A. B. Campbell, a retired naval officer. The idea was that participants discuss questions that were sent in by listeners on practically anything and the popularity of the show was increasing from time to time. As an influential public intellectual, what Joad said philosophically was recognized and listened to by many among the non-professionals. In his article on British philosophy, Jonathan Rée wrote about Joad that “[t]hrough his teaching [at the Philosophy Depart- ment at Birkbeck College, London] and numerous plain and unintimidating

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books, Joad introduced hundreds of people to Plato, Aristotle, and Russell, and to general metaphysics conceived as a justification for mildly progressive politics and a protection against nihilistic skepticism” (Rée 1993, p. 7). Shortly after the war, Joad was less favored due to some of his acts in public discourse, but during the 1930s and early 1940s, many people listened to his words. Thus it might have been an important moment when such a philosopher and public intellectual attacked the physicist public intellectuals. Joad targeted Eddington and Jeans just like Stebbing and Philipp Frank did. Though Stebbing did not refer to Joad in her book, they certainly knew each other well. Already in 1919, Joad and Stebbing appeared in the same Symposium on Plato and the analysis of reality— Joad defending the Platonist position while Stebbing arguing for the common sense view. Ten years later they appeared again together on the pages on the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society writing about “Realism and Mod- ern Physics” as members of another symposium, see (Joad, Stebbing et al. 1919–1920; Laird, Joad, and Stebbing 1929). Joad respected both Eddington and Jeans as outstanding scientists, but he makes it explicit that he now considers them as supposed-to-be philosophers since their recent popularizing work is not about physics per se but about the philosophical implications of physical theories. Unlike Frank, and somehow a bit similar to Stebbing, Joad thus subjects the works of Eddington and Jeans to “the ordinary methods of philosophical analysis” ([1932] 1963, p. 15). By showing the ambiguities in Eddington’sown presentation, and making explicit his contradictory presuppositions and commitments, Joad obviously suggests not to trust Eddington’s philosophical insights. Just as Stebbing conceived the matter, Joad did not think that scientific authority necessarily comes with philosophical authority. He also points out that while both Jeans and Eddington aim at defending an idealist position, their talk and mode of writing still connote certain realist elements; the way they speak presupposes that they believe or postulate external entities and not just idealistic elements. “Sense organs can be stim- ulated neither by mind stuff nor by pointer readings,” argues Joad ([1932] 1963, p. 28), “but only by qualitatively differentiated physical material.” Not seeing through all the consequences of a certain claim seems to be the usual mistake of the physicists according to Joad. While he put forward many philosophical arguments about the various idealist theses, he did not criticize one thing: namely the usage of metaphysics. He never had any problem with metaphysical speculations or the artic- ulation of comprehensive worldviews; he indeed even defined philosophy along that lines as “it is the business of philosophy to correlate the evidence collected by the special sciences, and to try fit it into a coherent scheme of the universe as a whole” (Joad [1932] 1963, p. 7). In the building-task, the

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philosopher has two independent sources to rely on. One is science that by the early decades of the twentieth century seemed to earn an inevitable status in public matters; the other is “the vision of the artist, the religious consciousness of the saint, and the day-to-day experience of the plain man” and these “are equally facts of which philosophy must take cognizance” ([1932] 1963, p. 7). Joad was an ardent defender of common sense (similarly to Stebbing) and as the experience of the layman became increasingly con- trasted with the statements of scientists, he did not want to drop any of them, but made it the task of philosophy to “harmonize them.” This harmonization process came with a grand narrative. According to it, nineteenth-century science invaded the territory of life and the directly experienced world of people. Preferring certain mechanistic conceptions and analogies of machines, the physical sciences delivered such a picture of the universe in which there was no objective, that is, mind-independent place for values, such as moral, aesthetical or religious ones. Values were deemed to be subjective, thus of no concern for scientists and not apt for rational discussion. In this mechanistic world of see and touch to be real, “to apprehend values or to enjoy religious experience was to wonder in a world of shadows” (Joad [1932] 1963, p. 11). With the new physics of the twentieth century, continues Joad, a new picture emerged. Within this picture, we might have now found a place for values: the new mathematical approach to physical matters pointed out the defectiveness of the mechanistic conception and with its more flexible and abstract formulations it opened up space for those values and considerations that were declared to be subjective and implicitly irrational earlier. If to be real does not mean any more than to be seeable and touchable, then the realm of values indeed get a major boost in its claim for existence. Sci- entists over-egged the pudding, however. As Joad ([1932] 1963, p. 12) claimed, “[t]he wheel has turned full circle, and in their enthusiasm for idealistic interpretations of phenomena many scientists seem anxious to deny the revelatory character of science altogether.” By bringing closer the empirical world to that of mathematics, scientists did not harmonize the competing views of the world but emphasized the mathematical and ideal character of the latter. Consciousness became not just a matter for scientific inquiry, but the fundamental base of every kind of existence and every scientific fact. As the empirical world is just a shadowy appearance of the more important and genuine Platonist- idealistic reality, the empirical sciences lose the significance of their world- revealing character. “If science is no longer a useful stick with which to beat religion,” says the verdict of Joad ([1932] 1963, p. 13), “it does not follow that religion is appropriately employed for the castigation of science.”

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Joad instead formulates a certain “equality-thesis” according to which scientific and all other forms of experience are on the same footing, that is, either both of them are subjective, or both of them are objective. As he defended the objectivity of common sense previously (see e.g., Joad 1919), he aimed to prove the objectivity-equality thesis. But this has an even more important consequence; if common sense and different forms of everyday experience reveal objective features of the world, all the value- experiences are brought under new light. Realism strikes back. Joad was always interested in the questions of values (most importantly, providing the most detailed account, [see Joad 1929]). In his own defini- tion, value is that which “the mind apprehends in ethical, in aesthetic and in religious experience, which is at once a common element in the objects of these experiences and confers upon them their peculiar importance” ([1932] 1963, p. 147). The question is indeed whether there are values in this sense in the world, or whether we as “anxious minds” are projecting alleged values onto the world “to find a guarantee for the truth of [our] private convictions and a sanction for [our] spiritual aspirations” ([1932] 1963, p. 147). He settled on the realist side of the dilemma. Joad was sketching and discussing two worldviews, one monist, and one pluralist. In the monist way, the world is one and united, and different types of experiences (scientific, religious, aesthetic etc.) reveal different perspectives of the same world. The pluralist world, however, is already stratified, having different orders. These are incompatible metaphysical views, but he ([1932] 1963, p. 204) argued that “it is only on the basis of a plu- ralistic metaphysic that we are entitled to claim an objective reference for the results of modern physics.” The world consists of at least three layers; (1) there is the order of material constituents of which the physical world is composed (though they are analyzable in terms of sense data); (2) there is the order of minds that are aware of this material order; finally (3) there is the order of changeless things that are neither mental nor material. Joad designates them with the word “subsistent” as they are entirely independent of physical and mental entities. Even though all the entities of order (1), (2), and (3) are real, the word “reality” is restricted to the order of (3) thus indicating in a certain sense Joad’s implicit preferences. Joad is uncertain whether values belong to the third sphere or into a further one, but he notes that the experiences of the changeless order of (3) have a further property, namely “significance. The general name by which I propose to designate this property is that of value” (Joad [1932] 1963, p. 213). Speaking of development, Joad had the following in mind, described by his simile of a searchlight. Imagine a dark room filled with things. A searchlight illuminates objects that are found there but not formed by it.

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Joad conceives the relation of reality to our mind in a similar fashion. Our mind and senses are capable of finding objects in the world, but they do not create those objects. Joad ([1932] 1963, pp. 206–7) is a realist who accepts the non-contributory character of knowledge, that is, he claims, “knowledge […] does not in any way contribute to the nature of its objects.” This is much more like a conviction for him that is based on un- certainty as Joad “know[s] of no method by which we can assign limits to the exercise of this [contributory] capacity” of knowledge. In order to avoid the slippery slope, he cuts it short right at the beginning. As we discover objects just like a searchlight does, Joad thinks that through evolution we became aware of new orders of things: in his big picture, the third order of changeless objects was always there in the world but only through the evolution of human mind and history was it discovered by us. It should be noted though, that later, in his book on Decadence, Joad presented a new metaphilosophy that was, if not pessimistic, at least less optimistic about the positivity of scholarly development. He reasoned about the possibility of philosophy’s progress as follows: If, as I believe, philosophy is largely concerned with an objective and changeless world of value and with the manner of its intrusion into the familiar world which we know by means of our senses, then the objects of philosophy are, as Plato maintained, eternal. […] The world of “eternality” is always present to men’s mind, and there is no reason why the twentieth century A.D. should enjoy a deeper insight into its nature than the fourth century B.C. Hence it is unreasonable to expect progress in philosophy, if progress is taken to mean the accumulation of a developing body of ascertained and verifiable knowledge. (Joad 1948, p. 39) Joad might have in mind, for example, those philosophies that considered the new scientific results as important achievements for philosophers as well and claimed that philosophy’s progress is entangled with that of the sciences. Many scholars saw logical empiricism or positivism as such a philosophy. Philipp Frank (2020) even quoted the above passage from Joad (as the testament of those who opposed logical empiricism and its allied movements, like pragmatism) in his unpublished book manuscript, called The Humanistic Background of Science, and sarcastically called the reader’s attention to the alleged “progressivity” of Joad. Philosophers of science usually find a way to each other, especially if they had a certain form of social engagement. And Joad knew the works and personnel of the logical empiricist movement. Neurath invited him to his Oxford-based “Unity of Science” meeting in 1941, though presumably he did not show up at the event. In 1944 and 1945 he got into a fight with Neurath about

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the relation between Platonism and Fascism (defending Plato against Neurath and Joseph A. Lauwerys’ charges), while a few years later he attacked A. J. Ayer and accused him and his work on Language, Truth and Logic to prepare such a moral vacuum that helped the spread of Fascism at Oxford University (Tuboly 2020a). There is much more to say about Joad, but the contours of the main picture could perhaps already be seen: Joad the metaphysician attacked the particular theses of the physicists but condemned Jeans and Eddington for not having a proper theory of values. As there are objective values, their reality has to be discovered and accounted for by philosophers. Even if we can argue about physical realities in the light of science, the objective reality of the third realm cannot be rejected. Nonetheless, Joad might not be undisputable fair in his criticism of Eddington. While the latter presumably did not have such a detailed theory of values as Joad would have required from a philosopher who deals with the philosophical consequences of the sciences, he devoted an entire chapter to “Science and Mysticism.” As he claims there, “[f]eelings, purpose, values, make up our consciousness as much as sense-impressions” (Eddington 1928, p. 323). In fact, there were presumably much more in Eddington than what Joad realized. Eddington’s popular work, besides the obvious philosophical and scientific points, contained another dimension, namely a broader political line, connecting nations, values and policies. As Michael Stanley (2008, p. 1919) put the hidden question explicit succinctly, “[w]ould [Britain] re- claim its endangered heritage as a moral, religious nation, or would it spiral into the totalitarianism and materialist bankruptcy of the Russian revolution.” Stanley (2008) has argued in details that Eddington’s works indeed had a quite robust political dimension, namely, he took up the fight against the widely spread materialist/communist (Eddington did not stratify these categories) philosophies that tried to show a determinist and mechanized picture of the human world. Though Eddington’s political engagement is barely recognizable today at first glance, Stanley argues that Eddington’s Quaker background—consisting in the admiration for the spiritual element in the world, the recognition of the human side of the universe, and the subjective character of religious experience—is clearly presented (and it was recognized by his contemporaries) behind the argumentation for the significance of the mystical and religious elements in the world, making place for free will and moral responsibility. Joad was thus perhaps not on the best track to find the weaknesses of Eddington’s general view.18

18. The often-unrecognized connection between Eddington’s mystical line and his personal social and religious life is discussed (against the cultural background of science vs. religion in England) (Bowler 2001, Ch. 3; Stanley 2007).

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The reception of Joad’s book agreed about his style and mode of presentation: everyone thought that the book is lucid, witty, enlightening, sharp, but still has a certain felicity about its tone. Nonetheless, reviewers also aligned regarding the point that Joad should not be followed in his path towards his conclusions in the way he proceeds. The English philosopher A. Boyce Gibson (1932) claimed, for example, that Joad’srefutationof idealism is a straight consequence of his shallow reading of the physicists and the lack of proper (or any) reading of Hegel. Because of his inclination towards idealism (and towards a certain wish to escape from reality), Gibson (1932, p. 482) feared that Joad would accuse him of “parochial- ism,” but “perhaps the universe is more like a parish than emancipated people like Mr. Joad are disposed to believe.” Thus the problem is not that Joad is absorbed in metaphysics, but that he is absorbed in the wrong metaphysical approach, namely realism and the critique of idealism. Gibson hit such a tone about Hegel, Bradley and the objective mind that was scarcely widespread in England during the early 1930s among philosophers. The fact that Joad pursued metaphysics, however, did not appeal to many philosophers. P. Le Corbeiller (French-American engineer, mathematician, and public intellectual) wrote, for example, a quite harsh and negative review of thebook.HeclaimedthatbesidesJoad’s defective knowledge of aesthetics and its history (in the value chapters), Joad asks what a chair is. The reviewer points out that there are various answers (from the viewpoint of common sense, or from the scientific perspective, etc.), but naturally, none of these satisfy Joad, for “he wishes to know what the chair really is” (Corbeiller 1949, p. 78). Asking always further for the “real” chair does not in any way help the rational discussion that should be taken up by citizens, especially if you do not have unshakable arguments to back up your fancy ideas. Corbeiller thus criticizes Joad for including in the book long chapters about his personal view of the world, mobilizing his unsupported metaphysical ideas that have nothing to do with science or scientific philosophy. Now we are getting closer to the idea that the metaphysical answer to the metaphysics of Jeans and Eddington is unsatisfying exactly because of its metaphysical character. Victor Lenzen’s review made this quite explicit. Lenzen earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard but worked later as a physicist at Berkeley. He praised Joad for his style and lucidity but raised the problem of how the work could be a book on science and its implications if there is almost no mention of scientific matters in it. Lenzen (1932, p. 584) had another, even stronger critical line. He claimed that, after all, too much space is devoted to the metaphysical speculations of Jeans and Eddington. If Joad wanted to work on the relations between science and philosophy, and the philosophical perspective on contemporary physical science, then he could have chosen better philosophers, or for that matter, philosophers.

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Lenzen had in mind members of the Vienna Circle, namely Schlick, Carnap, and Frank. Between 1927 and 1928 Lenzen was in Europe with a scholarship and he went to Vienna in order to lecture at the meetings of the Vienna Circle; later he met Schlick when the founder of the Vienna Circle was a guest professor at Berkeley. Though they were of a low opinion on Lenzen, he knew their works well and even wrote a monograph for Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Uniﬁed Science on the “Procedures of Empirical Science” (Lenzen [1938] 1971). The main importance of logical positivists for Lenzen was that they simply rejected metaphysics: the question was not that whether idealism was right or wrong, or Joad’s arguments against idealism were correct and thus his realist value-pluralism should be preferred, but how we should proceed in the scientiﬁc analysis of philosophical problems. The old ways were meaningless ways. Frank would have indeed been a nice example or source for Joad, as he wrote continuously about the philosophical and social implications of physical theories.

5. Philipp Frank – External Factors and their Effects on Science Philipp Frank was a physicist turned philosopher. After being educated at the University of Vienna, he was appointed to the Physics Department of the German University of Prague partly due to the positive recommenda- tion of Albert Einstein. Frank had major contributions to the theory of relativity, and after being the head of the department in Prague for almost thirty years he emigrated to the United States and obtained a half-paid job at Harvard (Holton 2006; Tuboly 2017). Next to Otto Neurath, Frank was the organizational motor of logical empiricism, and later of the Unity of Science Movement. He established the Institute for the Unity of Science in Boston and wrote many popularizing accounts of logical empiricism. In certain circles (especially around Boston and New York) he was well respected for his openness, inclination towards discussion with almost everyone, and for his ability to teach hundreds of young students philosophy, science, and their interconnec- tions. As one of his still living and famous colleagues, Gerald Holton (2006, p. 302) said, “[h]e could explain so simply because he understood so clearly.” There were many things that made Frank a nice candidate for the ex- amination of the philosophical implications of physical sciences: Frank wrote the Foundations of Physics monograph for Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Uniﬁed Science, and both of his selected writings (in 1941 and 1949) were centered around the boundary questions of philosophy, science, and culture in a broad sense. He was a forerunner of many later developments in philosophy of science: Frank pursued not just theoretical

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physics, philosophy of physics, but also sociology of science, and many of his ideas became very close (if not identical) to the later so-called strong program (Uebel 2000a). He was also well aware of the historically con- strained and determined modes of knowledge(-production); thus there might be direct inﬂuence-lines between Frank and Gaston Bachelard whom Frank invited to the congresses of logical empiricism, and with the historical epistemology of Marx Wartofsky who founded the Boston Center for Philosophy and History of Science that had various direct and explicit connections to Frank. Frank knew (and did) his physics, perhaps even better than anyone else in the circle (his only real competitor was perhaps Hans Reichenbach). He also knew his philosophy: with Hans Hahn and Otto Neurath he was an initiating member of the so-called First Vienna Circle before World War One (Uebel 2000b).19 He read a lot of Duhem, Poincaré, and Mach and tried to synthetize their perspectives on the methodological questions of science and its philosophical implications. He claimed that due to the empirical underdetermination of scientiﬁc theories (both social and physical sciences), the choice between competing theories could not be a one- dimensional decision measured on purely empirical grounds, but various factors have to be included both in the decision and in our understanding of the relation. Working in Central and East Europe, Frank was not concerned solely with Jeans and Eddington, but with the idealistic movement in general, and especially its German wing. In his paper “Is there a trend today toward idealism in physics?” (originally published in 1934 as a French paper), Frank discusses the question whether contemporary physical theories indeed have those consequences that many people attribute to them in their popular writings. As he summarizes the issue, it was often thought that the materialistic-mechanistic theories of Galileo and Newton were dropped in the twentieth century due to theoretical crises, and a much more mathematical conception took their place. As mathematics with its abstract formulas and equations played a major role in the new conception, the new physics brought with itself a new world conception as well. Since a certain “ideal,”“spiritual,” and “abstract” element resides in mathematics (or so it was claimed), the new physics with its mathematical conception of nature con- veys a trend towards idealism in matters of philosophy and worldviews in general. Frank (1937, pp. 48–9) also noted that both idealists (mainly Germans)

19. Although the existence of a pre-Circle was questioned recently by Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau (2018), it is still well conﬁrmed that Frank had many discussions with Hahn and Neurath, and that he acquired a signiﬁcant knowledge in contemporary philosophy, among others as the Austrian translator of Duhem.

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and materialists (mainly Russians) agreed on the idealistic leanings of the new physics; they differed only in their attitudes regarding how to evaluate that point. As always, Frank ([1934] 1949, p. 124) distinguished two approaches, namely the logical and the sociological. The task for philosophy of science is to find out whether from a logical point of view certain statements follow from the presentation and working mechanisms of the physical sciences. The task for the sociology of science, on the other hand, is to reveal and explain the social roots of the supposed but explicitly presented metaphysical implications of physical theories. From the logical standpoint, Frank argued with most of the logical empiricists that mathematical statements are devoid of empirical content and thus they do not say anything about the nature of empirical matters. Their only function is to connect empirical statements and to make explicit our inferential commitments when we move from one statement to another. That is, even if the new scientific theories were mathematized beyond former expectations, this would not effect the empirical content of theories in themselves. Grounding your idealism in the fact that mathematics took a major role in your theories, thus, does not prove anything beyond the increasing amount of precision. But Frank did not stop at this point and presented further considerations against the dogmatist dead end of idealism. One of them was a symmetry argument. Many idealist interpreters of physical theories, like Jeans, for example, claim that if the empirical world obeys the abstract and pure mathematical laws, then there must be someone who created that mathematics and the world according to those laws. That is, the best explanation for the unbelievable and unexpected empirical success of abstract mathematical formulas is that the world was already organized according to them. As I said before, for Jeans, this creator was God, the biggest mathematician of all. That is, if the unexpected success of physicists using highly abstract mathematical formulations to describe the world is explained by the idea that the world was created by a mathematician, then (here comes the symmetry argument) “we might have said [that] with the same justification, back in the time of Newton” (Frank [1934] 1949, pp. 130–33). The symmetry argument works like this: if recent physical theories imply an idealist approach because of the unexpected success of mathematical formulations, then former physical theories shall imply the same idealist approach because of the unexpected success of the mathematical formulas that were used back then. As contemporary idealist defenders of the new metaphysics refuse to admit the idealist leanings of former theories (even though Newton was attacked especially by materialists!), their motivation

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and source for the idealist reading should be found outside of the purely (empirical) scientific field of reasons. That is indeed what Frank claimed. In the process of eliminating the “animistic,” nothing has been changed in the slightest by the modern physical theories. This process continues irresistibly forward as before. He who would interpret physics by means of “psychic factors” had at the time of the physics of Galileo and Newton the same justification as today. The role of the “psychic” has remained exactly the same. Hence, if there does exist today a greater tendency toward spiritualistic interpretation, it is connected only with processes that have nothing at all to do with the progress of physics. (Frank [1934] 1949, p. 126. Original emphasis.) In his late textbook on the philosophy of science from 1957 (but often even before that), Frank distinguished explicitly between two different forms or conceptions of truth. The one is a scientific, the other is a philosophical conception. He claimed that it often happened that certain theories (e.g., of Copernicus and later of Galileo) were accepted on a purely mathematical basis: their predictions worked, the mathematics was consistent—thus they were utilized in scientific and empirical matters. Frank (1957, ch. 15) cites not just St. Augustine and later opponents of Galileo, but also Francis Bacon and George Berkeley who also emphasized a similar distinction between the various forms of truth. On the other hand, philosophical interpretations often stuck to these theories and their truth was disputable. This was Frank’s interpretation of the Galileo case: the heliocentric view was mathematically correct, but philosophically (or ideologically) false. It is hard to miss the Duhemian elements in this argumentation (and Frank [2020]) admitted this explicitly in his unpublished The Humanistic Background of Science); furthermore, Paul Feyerabend (1988, p. 277) also expressed his indebtedness to Frank with regard the idea of the irrationality of Galileo and the rationality of the Church. Contrary to some idealists (e.g., Bernhard Bavink), Frank claimed that the emergence of the idealist interpretation is not due to purely scientific reasons. He wrote in his textbook, “[o]bviously, we have to acknowledge that old and new physics can be interpreted spiritually, but there is no argument to show that they must be” (1957, p. 236). Frank showed this through his detailed logical and methodological studies of physical theories that I shall not discuss here in any more detail. But the question arises, of course, that what prompts these interpretations? He argued that both the materialistic and antimaterialistic interpretations of science “generally have their origin in wishes to set up goals for desirable human conduct. These interpretations are connected with social, political, and religious

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trends” (1957, p. 234). As metaphysical views are expressions of worldviews, and worldviews come with value-commitments, defending a certain metaphysical view means defending a certain way of life, a certain moral command for human behavior. These metaphysical considerations could not be eliminated easily. Frank (1950) thought that modern science is especially abstract, thus in order to make it understandable for the layman, we have to present its ideas in common-sense language. One way to do that is to derive with long and complex mathematical deductions statements that can be intersubjectively tested. The other way was a certain “shortcut,” namely the presentation of physical ideas directly in the common sense language, thus distorting the abstract principles. This is what usually happens when we talk about the metaphysical interpretation of physical theories, and as these chains (either the long or the short cut) of transmission from the abstract to the common sense language are to be envisioned in a multi-dimensional way, values always have to enter into the process. Thus our metaphysical interpretation again depends on our own values and commitments.20 With this idea, we are getting closer to Lakatos’ idea of the relevance of external factors for scientiﬁc contents. While Lakatos’ project and his ﬁrst but lost Hungarian dissertation in 1947 was entitled The Sociology of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences,Frank’s project is more aptly described as The Sociology of the Metaphysical Interpretations of Theories in the Natural Sciences. In Frank’s eyes, the problem with Jeans and Eddington was mainly that they tried to press upon physical theories such an interpretation that is not permitted directly and purely by the theoretical statements themselves, but is prompted rather by their own metaphysical inclinations and commitments. Frank knew that he was not an exception: everybody had a worldview that worked in the background. The claim of “not having a worldview” and possessing complete neutrality is also a worldview. As Frank said in his monograph, Foundations of Physics ([1946] 1971, p. 428), “a physicist who dodges all logical analysis and tries to be a ‘physicist and only a physicist’ will imbue the presentation of his subject with some ‘chance philosophy’, usually a very obsolete one.” Lakatos’ accusation of Stebbing being a petit bourgeois would perhaps not have been that alien for Frank either.

20. Stebbing (1934, p. 85) also noted the idea that complex and unknown scientiﬁc issues can be made understandable by connecting them to already known facts and conceptions. To make this route safe, for Stebbing, means thus that being clear about the logical aspect of this relation is inevitable. For more details about Frank’s approach of how metaphysics became the tool of making abstract scientiﬁc issues understandable, see Tuboly (2020b).

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6. Summing Up Seemingly, with Lenzen’s critique of Joad, our circle is now closed. As Frank thought that the whole issue of Jeans and Eddington is partly about misleading metaphysics, that is, drawing such conclusions that are not permitted by scientific premises, Lenzen also wrote in his review that Joad’s answer to the metaphysician’s considerations expresses another simple, unwarranted metaphysics. Stebbing tried to overcome the disturbing metaphysical/misleading/biased and deceptive language of Eddington and Jeans by emphasizing the (supposedly) neutral, rational and informal character of her communicative ideas and the common sense practice of discussion and persuasion instead of agitation and intimidation. As we saw, there were different strategies of how to debunk the author- itative character, philosophical suggestions, and misseminating strategies of Jeans and Eddington. Interestingly, such diverging figures as the metaphysician and cultural fighter Joad, the public intellectual and sensitive Stebbing, and the well-respected physicist-turned-philosopher and logical empiricist Frank agreed on their judgment about the physicists’ enterprise: though it is of utmost importance to reveal, discuss and disseminate the philosophical and cultural outcomes of the new physical theories, it should be done (1) by philosophers; (2) in a more polished and balanced way; (3) and by evading the out-of-fashion idealist impulses. As philosophers concerned with providing a general worldview (Joad), with seeing things through minutely by contouring the boundaries and hidden patterns behind linguistic practices (Stebbing), and with socio-historically interpret- ing the context and logical constitution of scientific theories (Frank), they hold a particularly important position in knowledge dissemination. Stebbing, Joad, and Frank were united also in the belief that scientists alone could not be the bearers of the torch of Science (with a capital ‘S’), but a persistent discussion shall be maintained in order to critically re- structure arguments and reasons on both sides. Their example might also reveal to us that when scientists take a stand outside their primary field to philosophize—and, according to Frank, they are doing philosophy even if they claim that philosophy is dead—their statements enter the space of reasons of philosophers where new commitments and endorsements take the place of the old ones. Within this, regardless of their specific philosophical commitments, philosophers could take a stand too. Stebbing, Joad, and Frank indeed did that. This whole debate might have even further consequences and dimensions than were discussed here. In 1943, during a symposium on Jean’s philosophy of physics, the famous British mathematician Edmund T. Whittaker got on the side of Jeans and defended him from Stebbing and Richard Braithwaite. What is even more interesting is how Whittaker tried

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to mediate between Stebbing and Jeans. He claimed that Stebbing might have been right about how we cannot draw any strict logical consequences about mind and matter in physics per se. But, according to Whittaker, Stebbing forgot something, namely that the relevant issues about mind and matter in the context of physics “will not be without a certain psychological effect, at any rate, on people who ask themselves whether they should believe in determinism as a general philosophical doctrine” (Whittaker 1943, p. 212). What Jeans—but also, of course, Eddington—stressed was that they took seriously the psychologicalneedofthosepeoplewhogaveany thought to similar issues and wanted an understandable answer. Although Stebbing’s presentation were crystal-clear, well-structured, sharp and minutely worked out, it was perhaps hard to remember all the premises, consequence-relations, and definitions, and one could be easily lost in the details. Jeans and Eddington, on the other hand, with all their analogies, metaphors, and nebulous pictures, “have a quality which is found, perhaps, most markedly in great poets, of having flashes of insight which reveal to them things which are beyond the range of exact knowledge” (Whittaker 1943, pp. 212–13). This debate is not new, of course, and was played on the continent as well (one might easily think about Carnap’s famous dictum about meta- physicians as being—bad—poets). What this indicates though is that even on the field of physics, when someone tries to disseminate the new knowledge elements and brings up philosophical points, it does matter what type of philosophy and concept of understanding is used. While Whittaker gave the “fullest credit to Professor Stebbing’s logical criticism,” he also noted that he “cannot withhold [his] admiration from Jeans and Eddington for a quality which is perhaps of a higher order” (Whittaker 1943, p. 213; emphasis added). There is much more to say, of course, in this context of how idealism disappeared by the 1940s from the discourse of scientists and of the educated laymen. What I tried to point out here is only that those paths that were or were not taken in these debates were much more stratified and diverse than the usual stories about the history of philosophy of science might convey.

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