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The Unintelligibility of “Observational Equivalence”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Michael R. Gardner
Michael R. Gardner*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Extract

In his recent book Space, Time, and Spacetime, Lawrence Sklar has argued for a fundamental re-orientation in the philosophical study of the logical and epistemic status of the geometry of physical space. A very large part of the recent literature in this area, he notes (p. 109) has been concerned with the alleged bearing of the continuity of space on the question of whether geometry is the object of empirical knowledge, conventional stipulation, or utter ignorance. That continuity has been thought crucial is due, of course, largely to the enormous influence of the work of Adolf Gruhbaum (e.g., [9]). Sklar, however, argues (pp. 109-112) that the issue of continuity is in fact irrelevant to the logical and epistemic status of geometry, and that its pursuit leads one away from the fundamental questions involved. (See also Michael Friedman for a definitive critique of Grünbaum.)

Type
Part III. Philosophy of Physics
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 104 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I wish to thank Lindley Darden, Clark Glymour, Dudley Shapere, Lawrence Sklar, and the PSA referee for comments on an earlier draft. I also wish to acknowledge financial support from the General Research Board of the University of Maryland.

Professor Glymour kindly called to my attention some of his own work [7] which criticizes Sklar's trilemma in a way quite different from mine — namely, by arguing that his classification of positions is based on the false assumption that two theories with the same observational consequences are necessarily equally well tested by given data.

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