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AKPhil: Arbeitskreis Philosophie der Physik

AKPhil 8: Geschichte der Wissenschaftsphilosophie

AKPhil 8.2: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 5. März 2008, 17:15–17:45, KGI-HS 1015

Shifting the a priori: Hans Reichenbach on Causality and Probability 1915-1931 — •Michael Stöltzner — IZWT, Universität Wuppertal, Gaußstr. 20, 42119 Wuppertal

I analyze the historical development of Reichenbach's ideas on causality and probability from his Ph.D. thesis in 1915 until the mid 1930s. Already in 1915, he developed two central themes. First, the principle of causality, to become applicable to physical phenomena, must be supplemented with a second principle, then called principle of the continuous probability function. Second, there existed no fundamental difference between the theory of error presupposed by any measuring science and the probabilistic theories of physics. This implied that strict and statistical laws were lawful in the same sense - an idea that Reichenbach abandoned in his 1944 Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. As regards the principles' epistemological status, Rei-chenbach, initially, considered both as synthetic a priori. During the 1920s he held that causality could fail in the empirical world, while the more basic principle of probability inference was immune to refutation. Both principles, accordingly, had changed rank. While originally the second principle had only represented an indispensable complement to causality, it now represented a condition for the possibility of scientific experience, even though it could not be justified by a transcendental argument. Probability inference also allowed Reichenbach to base the direction of time on microscopic causal order rather than entropy increase.