Giovanelli, Marco (2012) Talking at Cross-Purposes. How Einstein and Logical Empiricists never Agreed on what they were Disagreeing about. [Preprint]

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Abstract

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach in a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, the paper shows, that not only Einstein and Logical Empiricists came to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but they actually, in their life-long interchange, never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his “measuring rod objection” against Weyl. Logical Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein-Weyl debate, tried on the contrary to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz-Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmhotzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, whose philosophical significance, however, still needs to be fully explored.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Giovanelli, Marco marco.giovanelli@uni-tuebingen.de
Keywords:	Keywords: Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Epistemology of Geometry
Subjects:	General Issues > Conventionalism General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory
Depositing User:	Dr. Marco Giovanelli
Date Deposited:	17 Jul 2012 06:07
Last Modified:	17 Jul 2012 06:07
Item ID:	9234
Subjects:	General Issues > Conventionalism General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > Logical Positivism/Logical Empiricism Specific Sciences > Physics > Relativity Theory
Date:	July 2012
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/9234

Available Versions of this Item

• Talking at Cross-Purposes. How Einstein and Logical Empiricists never Agreed on what they were Discussing about. (deposited 10 Jul 2012 19:44)
  • Talking at Cross-Purposes. How Einstein and Logical Empiricists never Agreed on what they were Disagreeing about. (deposited 17 Jul 2012 06:07) [Currently Displayed]

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