New entry on Mach in Stanford Encyclopedia 21 May 2008 Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a priori to explain how knowledge is possible, Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how an a priori is possible. One more patch of philosophy, it was thought, yielded to science. I had thought the originator of that view was Konrad Lorenz, in his Russian manuscript. Anyway, a new article by Paul Pojman. It looks very comprehensive, as articles in the increasingly diverse online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy usually are. Pojman, Paul, “Ernst Mach”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2008/entries/ernst-mach/>. Uncategorized
Uncategorized Yet Another Philosophy of Science Blog… 19 Mar 2009 But this one’s going to be huge. The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science has a new group blog. [How do I know? I set it up.] It will act as a clearing house for events and ideas at what has become a very large concentration of HPS types… Read More
Uncategorized Irony is alive 20 Mar 2008 PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein’s silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and guest in, though. The guest was Richard Dawkins… Read More
Uncategorized I can’t handle the Truth 23 Nov 2008 Siris has a nice short post on the use of “truth” in discourse: This appeal to truth is incantatory: it is not an argument but a rhetorical ploy that usually involves a false dichotomy. By ritually displaying one’s ‘interest in the truth’ in contrast with someone else’s interest in something… Read More
Nice coincidence: > Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how > an a priori is possible You posted that just 10 minutes after I’d written some lecture notes on the topic. I didn’t know it was due to Mach … fortunately, what I wrote was general enough that my ignorance didn’t matter. (I attributed it to the logical positivists in general, and I DID say that a lot of their views were due to Mach.)
Thanks for the interesting link. I too didn’t know that Mach was an early evolutionary epistemologist. I found a nice paper by the Hungarian philosopher Caba Pléh in which he nicely traces genealogy of some ideas of evolutionary epistemology from Ernst Mach to Dan Dennett. It appears that Ernst Mach’s train of thought influenced the German psychologist Karl Bühler (who’s mostly famous for his Organon-Model of Language). Bühler in turn was a teacher to both Konrad Lorenz and Karl Popper, who were inspired by his ideas in different ways. Popper, and in a weaker, indirect sense, Lorenz then influenced Dan Dennetts evolutionary reasoning about stances and Popperian creatures. http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/Publications/History%20and%20theory%20of%20cognition/MACH.DOC http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/csaba/English/index_angol.htm The site seems to be down at the moment, though