From structuralism to neutral monism in Arthur S. Eddington's philosophy of physics

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Highlights

  • We show that neutral monism emerges from Eddington's philosophy of physics.

  • The relation between Eddington's Quakerism and his structuralism.

  • How Eddington was influenced by Bertrand Russell and the Gestalt psychology.

Abstract

Arthur S. Eddington is remembered as one of the best astrophysicists and popularizers of physics in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, his stimulating speculations in philosophy produced serious disputes among philosophers of his time, his philosophy remaining linked to idealism and mysticism. This paper shows this label to be misleading and argues for the identification of Eddington's philosophy with a kind of neutral monism regained from Bertrand Russell and influenced by the Gestalt psychology. The concept of structure is fundamental to our argument for the existence of a veiled neutral monism in Eddington's ideas.

Section snippets

Introduction: Idealism and mysticism in Eddington

In an influential article devoted to make clear the nature of Arthur S. Eddington's structuralist views, Steven French wrote that “there is much more to say […] about Eddington's view of the spiritual dimension of the external world and how that relates to his structuralist approach to physics” (French, 2003, p. 255), but French reflected above all on the kind of structuralism Eddington proposed. The present paper should be understood as a continuation of French's request. We will not deal with

Eddington’s philosophy of physics

According to Eddington, the purpose of physics is to determine the correlation between events that can be measured in one way or another. Physics, therefore, was reduced to pointer readings (Eddington, 1935, p. 293)—any measurement of an observable physical quantity was represented, spatialized, and projected via two-dimensional readings: “atoms or things like atoms […] must not (in exact science) be thought of as possessing any other nature than that of a bundle of pointer-readings” (

Eddington’s epistemic dualism

In every one of his books, Eddington stressed the epistemological perspective. From the very first pages of his first semi-philosophical books, Eddington presented the two different views of a table. There was the familiar table, which “has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial […]. It is a thing” (Eddington, 1929a, p. xi). And there was also the “scientific table […] nearly all empty space” (Eddington, 1929a, p. xii) made up of “tiny electric

Eddington and the external world

How to argue the existence of an external world? The structure of the physical world, Eddington thought, was represented mathematically through group theory, and “our knowledge of structure is communicable, whereas much of our knowledge is incommunicable” (Eddington, 1939, p. 142).

The origin of the structure was an unknowable objective stuff belonging to the external world which was common to all consciousnesses:

It is possible for a group of sensations in my mind to have the same structure as a

Eddington against materialism

To many physicists, Eddington included, the theory of relativity and quantum theory had rejected materialism in favor of an epistemological approximation that was less naïve and closer to logical positivism. Bertrand Russell wrote: “Whoever reads, for example, Professor Eddington Space, Time and Gravitation […] will see that an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern physics” (Russell, 1921, p. 5).

In another of his books, Russell stated, “We know much more […] about the

Eddington’s journey from the physical world to physical knowledge

In The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington believed in a monist world system of which “mind-stuff” was the basic element. He defined his own mind-stuff as “the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world” (Eddington, 1929a, p. 278), where “the relations unite the relata [and] the relata are the meeting points of the relations” (Eddington, 1929a, p. 230).

The “mind-stuff” theory, a kind of panpsychism, was introduced by the mathematician and

Eddington and the concept of structure

What is preserved behind the phenomenal world is the structure,21 which consists of reducing “the phenomena to their expressions in terms of the relations which we call intervals and the relata which we call events” (Eddington, 1923, p. 41).22 We see that this definition is practically identical to Eddington’s

Eddington’s a priori knowledge and selective subjectivism

Eddington drew an analogy between the brain and a newspaper office (Eddington, 1935, p. 3–4), where messages (the structural pattern) from the outside world arrive encrypted but are made up into a presentable story (an admixture of journalistic imagination) that our consciousness becomes aware of. Speaking of this “journalistic imagination”, namely the general concepts (colors, sounds, spaciousness, substance), with which the subject/observer clothes the messages coming from the external world

Eddington and the Gestalt psychology

Psychologists’ studies of Gestalt have led to the conclusion that what we perceive is actually a complex construction determined by not only stimuli from the external world but also previous experiences and the so-called gestalten of our direct experiences (consciousness) that help to interpret the data received from the exterior.

Eddington corresponded with Kurt Koffka—a psychologist who was a founder of Gestalt psychology and the one who systematized it, continuing the work of Wertheimer and

Conclusion

Schrödinger (1940, p. 403) cited the following excerpt as capturing Eddington’s outlook: “I have been acting as advocate for an extreme view, presuming that your natural prejudices are all the other way” (Eddington, 1939, p. 113). The foregoing citation by Schrödinger encapsulates what this article has attempted to show, namely, that the philosophy Eddington argued was quite different from the one he insisted he was arguing. All the arguments we have presented so far have attempted to

Acknowledgements

This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, “FFI2011-25475 – Innovación oculta: cambio de paradigma en los estudios de innovación”. I would like to thank Dr. Mathew Stanley, from Gallatin School of Individualized Study in New York, for reading the manuscript thoroughly and for his unvaluable comments. I also wish to mention the helpful critics of the referees, which made this paper to look much better.

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