The logic of modern physicsBridgman, P. W. (Percy Williams)
Philosophy
The logic of modern physics
Bridgman, P. W. (Percy Williams)
Physics -- Philosophy
It is evident that if we adopt this point of view toward concepts,
namely that the proper definition of a concept is not in terms of its
properties but in terms of actual operations, we need run no danger of
having to revise our attitude toward nature. For if experience is always
described in terms of experience, there must always be correspondence
between experience and our description of it, and we need never be
embarrassed, as we were in attempting to find in nature the prototype of
Newton's absolute time. Furthermore, if we remember that the operations
to which a physical concept are equivalent are actual physical
operations, the concepts can be defined only in the range of actual
experiment, and are undefined and meaningless in regions as yet
untouched by experiment. It follows that strictly speaking we cannot
make statements at all about regions as yet untouched, and that when we
do make such statements, as we inevitably shall, we are making a
conventionalized extrapolation, of the looseness of which we must be
fully conscious, and the justification of which is in the experiment of
the future.
There probably is no statement either in Einstein or other writers that
the change described above in the use of "concept" has been
self-consciously made, but that such is the case is proved, I believe,
by an examination of the way concepts are now handled by Einstein and
others. For of course the true meaning of a term is to be found by
observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it. We may
show that this is the actual sense in which concept is coming to be used
by examining in particular Einstein's treatment of simultaneity.
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