Jan Faye

Niels Bohr and contemporary philosophy

Preface. Introduction. Bohrs Response to EPR M. Beller, A. Fine. Niels Bohrs Words and the Atlantis of Kantianism C. Chevalley. A Bohmian Response to Bohrs Complementarity J.T. Cushing. Niels Bohr and Realism D. Favrholdt. Non-Locality or Non-Separability? A Defense of Niels Bohrs Anti-Realist Approach to Quantum Mechanics J. Faye. Bohrs Framework of Complementarity and the Realism Debate H.J. Folse. Description and Deconstruction: Niels Bohr and Modern Philosophy J. Honner. Bohr and the Crisis of Empirical Intelligibility: an Essay on the Depth of Bohrs Thought and our Philosophical Ignorance C.A. Hooker. What Makes a Classical Concept Classical? Toward a Reconstruction of Niels Bohrs Philosophy of Physics D. Howard. Niels Bohrs Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology to Physics P. Hoyningen-Huene. Niels Bohrs Conceptual Legacy in Contemporary Particle Physics D. Kaiser. A Critique of Bohrs Local Realism H. Krips. Bohr and the Realism Debates E. MacKinnon. The Bohr--Einstein Dispute D. Murdoch. Hidden Historicity: the Challenge of Bohrs Philosophical Thought U. Roseberg. Quantum Theory and the Place of Mind in Nature H.P. Stapp. References. Name Index.

Interpretation in the Natural Sciences

The distinction between the natural sciences and the liberal arts is usually regarded as significant. Not only do they deal with ontologically distinct objects, but the ways they come to terms with these objects are very different. In philosophy of science there has been a focus on explanation, in contrast to interpretation, because providing explanation was thought to be a key issue in the natural sciences. Since Carl Hempel’s seminal works on explanation, the world of philosophy has seen a growing body of literature devoted to explanation. The results have been prolific. Elsewhere I have argue in favour of a pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation, and it is in light of this theory that I suggest we can understand interpretation in the natural sciences (Faye 1999, 2007).

Explanation and Interpretation in the Sciences of Man

There is a long tradition for separating explanation from interpretation that has permeated the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the human sciences. The tradition was fuelled partly by the positivistic distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, partly by Hempel’s model of explanation, but mostly by the hermeneutic philosophy in the social and human sciences. These traditions may now have come to an end. In this paper I shall present a unitary theory of explanation and interpretation, a theory which I have argued for elsewhere, in which interpretations, or rather a group of interpretations, are considered as explanations of meaning.

Observing the Unobservable

For centuries philosophy has been troubled by the idea that experience as a whole, or parts of it, does not provide us with reliable knowledge of the objective world. The recurrent problem has always been to what extent our senses can be trusted as suppliers of information about physical things which exist independently of our mental capacities. Are they what they are perceived to be? The skeptical response was that we have no warranted grounds for relying upon the objectivity of our senses, not even in relation to everyday objects. What is available for cognitive judgement was assumed to be sense impressions which might, or might not, be causally correlated with unknown and inaccessible substances. At times, this was the British empiricists’ stand as a response to the challenge of Descartes’ skepticism.

Darwinism in disguise? A comparison between Bohr's view on quantum mechanics and QBism.

The Copenhagen interpretation is first and foremost associated with Niels Bohrs philosophy of quantum mechanics. In this paper, I attempt to lay out what I see as Bohrs pragmatic approach to science in general and to quantum physics in particular. A part of this approach is his claim that the classical concepts are indispensable for our understanding of all physical phenomena, and it seems as if the claim is grounded in his reflection upon how the evolution of language is adapted to experience. Another, recent interpretation, QBism, has also found support in Darwins theory. It may therefore not be surprising that sometimes QBism is said to be of the same breed as the Copenhagen interpretation. By comparing the two interpretations, I conclude, nevertheless, that there are important differences.

Hermeneutics and Human Nature

Abstract Hermeneutics has for a long time been the central philosophical approach informing the study of the humanities. This has, however, in the eyes of some, isolated the study of humanities from the study of nature. My primary claim is that the commonly perceived divorce between the natural sciences and humanities rests on faulty theories of both scientific methodology and the nature of explanation and interpretation as defended by prior schools of philosophy such as hermeneutics. In this paper I argue that it is time to reconsider the humanities and to base research in the humanities on a philosophical approach that rests its claims on naturalized and pragmatic considerations. Such a naturalistic view reflects not only the practice of this research better than hermeneutics, but brings the aims of scientific study of cultural phenomena in closer contact with the aims we find in the scientific study of natural phenomena. The article thus gives a naturalized account of the humanities by focusing on the similarities between the scientific practices within the natural sciences and the human sciences. Hence, I take issue with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view that understanding always involves interpretation. I also deny that understanding is associated with linguistic meaning and that all understanding is historically determined. In much recent literature the analysis of interpretation presented by the postmodernist schools has exacerbated this situation with its mistaken doctrine that understanding rests on interpretation in both the natural sciences and the human sciences. In contrast, I hold that understanding is a cognitive organization of information and beliefs. Such a conception opens up for the attribution of understanding to other beings apart from humans. Animals, just as humans, possess instinctive and acquired understanding without being involved in any act of interpretation. I also maintain that even if we isolate reflective understanding to human beings, this still does not give us reason to hold that all understanding is the immediate result of an interpretation. For instance, experiencing the world around us or reading a simple text often does not engage us in an interpretation of what we see or read. This is something we comprehend directly whenever we have acquired the relevant concepts in virtue of which we grasp our daily life. In contrast to the hermeneutic tradition I present a model of interpretation which, I believe, can bridge the much decried divorce between the disciplines leading to a unified view of the natural sciences and the human sciences. Interpretation, as I understand it, is an active cognitive procedure by which we attempt to solve a representational problem in cases where we don’t have any immediate comprehension. We have no such immediate grasp of the matter if what we see or read doesn’t fit into our background beliefs and knowledge. The purpose of interpretation is to yield understanding of what something – taken to represent something else – actually is representing, or how something unfamiliar might be represented. Thus an interpretation is the creation of either a hypothesis in virtue of which we explain what something symbolizes, stands for, designates, refers to, etc., or a hypothesis in virtue of which we construct a way of grasping an unknown phenomenon. In both cases the interpreter or the audience, or both, would gain an insight into something that was not understood prior to the interpretation. The above explication of interpretation and understanding paves the way for a unified approach to both the natural sciences and the humanities. If understanding is nothing but an organism’s organization of information and beliefs, then it seems quite evident that the empirical methods for gaining understanding in the natural sciences cannot be different from those we must use to acquire understanding in the humanities. The evolution by natural selection has established in our predecessors a disposition to detect false beliefs and stick to true beliefs. Humans are by nature intentional beings that learn from their cognitive successes and cognitive failures. So the justification of the use of empirical methods in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences is that these methods are grounded in a certain innate cognitive practice of belief acquisition. The capacity of learning is based on the cognitive mechanism of induction, and the modern specification of various types of empirical methods are abstracted and generalized from our mind’s reflection upon the cognitive practice that rests on this mechanism. In opposition to Dilthey and his school, Gadamer claimed that the humanities were not unique in demanding the use of methods different than those used in the natural sciences. However, he argued that objective interpretation of a text was not within the range of literary study. His reason for saying so was that any interpretation is bounded by a historical perspective and that the author’s intention has no role to play in an interpreter’s interpretation of a literary text. I believe he is wrong. I argue that Gadamer ignored a distinction between the act and the topic of interpretation. All interpreters are situated in a historical context and their interpretive hypotheses may be coloured by the existence of such a context. But if the topic of one’s interpretive hypotheses is the author’s intentions, which exist independently of hypothesis itself, and if one uses adequate evidence and empirical methods to justify these interpretations, the resulting insight will be as objective as something can be. Therefore, I conclude that a naturalistic stance to the humanities is superior to any hermeneutic stance.

Does the Unity of Science have a Future

The program of logical positivism gave inspiration to the unity of science movement. The movement carried the belief that all sciences, including the social sciences and the humanities, ought to share some common language if these disciplines were to be considered genuine sciences (Wissenschaften).

Niels Bohr and the Vienna Circle

The 2nd International Congress for the Unity of Science was held in Copenhagen from the 21st June to the 26th June 1936. Among the Danish participants was Jorgen Jorgensen, professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and the leading figure of logical positivism in Denmark, and Niels Bohr, the famous physicist, the father of the atomic theory, and the originator of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, the event took place in Bohr’s honorary mansion at Carlsberg. Jorgensen was the main organizer of the event in close collaboration with Otto Neurath. The latter had already been in Copenhagen twice, and the second time he had had a chance to meet and discuss with Bohr on epistemological issues. Again in 1936 he and Jorgensen had discussions with Bohr at a time which presented a very important period in Bohr’s thinking because the year before he had been confronted with the EPR-paradox. This final confrontation with Einstein gave Bohr a reason to change parts of his arguments. During this period of time Jorgensen seems to have supported Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation whole-heartedly. The purpose of the present talk is to present both Bohr’s and Jorgensen’s philosophy in an attempt of showing to what extent Bohr’s view, as it sometimes has been claimed, is an example of positivistic philosophy within physics.

Truth, Language, and Objectivity

Truth, meaning, and objectivity go together. A representationalist will usually subscribe to a form of correspondence theory of truth where something is true if and only if it correctly represents a state of affairs. Common-sense realists tend to agree with this. In this chapter John Austin’s proposal for a correspondence theory of truth is discussed. It is argued that the theory brings useful elements to a coherent understanding of truth. But it is also argued that according to the evolutionary naturalist, who opposes representationalism, these elements cannot stand alone. The additional elements should be borrowed from the theory of coherence. Thus it is argued that the truth relation is not an internal relation, as suggested by the correspondence theory, but instead an external relation holding between, say, a statement and a particular state of affairs. In the end this notion of truth is related to linguistic meaning and Michael Dummett’s argument for semantic antirealism.

Human Evolution and Mathematical Physics

This closing chapter focuses on mathematical representations and their capacity to say something true about the world in virtue of the existence of abstract mathematical structures. Among philosophers and scientists it is not uncommon to meet an attitude that our best scientific theories should be given a literal interpretation. Such a view can be traced back to Descartes who wanted to establish empirical knowledge on firm and infallible grounds. Abstract mathematical truths are believed to provide us with such grounds. If they represent the most fundamental structure of the world, we can simply read off from our best scientific theories a correct understanding of the physical world. The consequence is that modern physicists and philosophers seriously discuss possible worlds, many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and multiverses based on mathematical principles. Indeed, Descartes offered a very anti-Darwinian approach to epistemology. According to Darwinian epistemologist, however, scientific knowledge is fallible and confined to understanding the information we get from observation and experiments. It is argued that precisely such a Darwinian and pragmatic approach to knowledge is what we meet in Niels Bohr’s so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.