Abstract
This chapter concerns the philosophical and personal interactions between the Neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer and two members of the Berlin Group, Kurt Lewin and Hans Reichenbach. Both Lewin and Reichenbach were students of Cassirer’s in Berlin, and both explicitly discuss Cassirer’s work in their writings. After some biographical material drawn from their published and unpublished works and correspondence (Sect. 4.1), Sect. 4.2 of the paper argues that each of the three shared a broad conception of philosophy as the “logical analysis of science,” though each carried out this project in different ways. Lewin used philosophical ideas from Cassirer to motivate his original and consequential research program in experimental psychology (Sect. 4.3). Reichenbach, on the other hand, initially drew on Cassirer’s theory of the a priori in isolating a priori “coordinating principles” in general relativity, and then later rejected Cassirer’s theory by relabeling these principles as conventions (Sect. 4.4). That Cassirer did not follow Reichenbach into conventionalism springs, I argue, from Cassirer’s rejection of Reichenbach’s view that theory-neutral experimental measurements could ground physical theories in an objective way.
This paper greatly benefited from comments and conversations with Flavia Padovani, Erich Reck, Thomas Ryckman, and Audrey Yap. I also owe a special debt to Nikolay Milkov for first alerting me to Lewin’s relationship with Cassirer and the Berlin Group.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Cassirer (1921/1923).
- 3.
Cassirer (1907).
- 4.
Cassirer (1910/1923, Chs. 2–3).
- 5.
Letter from Reichenbach to Cassirer, 5 June 1931, HR [025-11-04]; 15 June 1931, HR [025-11-03]. These letters are reproduced in the CD-ROM accompanying Cassirer (2009). The other signers were prominent scientists, such as Hilbert and Einstein, and prominent industrialists. The 15 June letter concerns the best way of formulating the petition, with Reichenbach noting that Hilbert wanted him to present the petitioned chair as an oppositional counterweight to the unfortunate trend in German philosophy away from the philosophy of science. Reichenbach then commented to Cassirer: “I believe that you could not imagine how deep and widespread the animosity is among natural scientists to the prevailing trend in philosophy; it is in fact only your name that is excepted from this judgment.”
- 6.
This text is from a document titled “Zur ‘Relativität der Bezugssysteme',” housed in the Cassirer papers at Yale University. The text is quoted in Krois (2000). I don’t believe that this quotation shows that Cassirer felt a closer affinity to the Vienna Circle than to the philosophers of the Berlin Group. First, it is not clear whether Cassirer is distinguishing Reichenbach from the Viennese philosophers in this quotation. Second, the Berlin philosophers never formed a ‘school’ in the way that the Vienna Circle did. Third, all of the values that Cassirer attributes to the Vienna Circle and claims for his own appear just as clearly in the work of Reichenbach and Lewin. (Moreover, many of the doctrines that are distinctive to the Vienna Circle—contained for instance in Carnap et al’s “The Scientific Conception of the World”(1929/1973)—Cassirer rejected out of hand.)
- 7.
Neurath (1930, 312).
- 8.
Marrow (1969, 9).
- 9.
See the autobiographical remarks in Reichenbach’s 1916 dissertation: Reichenbach (2008, 149).
- 10.
Marrow (1969, 6).
- 11.
These writings fill two hefty volumes of Lewin’s Werkausgabe.
- 12.
Reichenbach (1936, 143).
- 13.
Neurath et al. (1931, 310).
- 14.
- 15.
On “genidentity,” see Lewin (1922).
- 16.
- 17.
Frederick Eberhardt and Clark Glymour, introduction to Reichenbach (2008, 2).
- 18.
Thanks to Simon Huttegger and Sabine Kunrath for helping me to decipher Cassirer’s handwriting in this letter.
- 19.
Reichenbach wrote: “I have here [at UCLA] a group of talented students interested in my ideas, and they would all be pleased to study with you.” These letters are reproduced in the CD-ROM accompanying Cassirer (2009).
- 20.
Reichenbach (1936, 142).
- 21.
- 22.
Reichenbach (1920/1965, 114).
- 23.
- 24.
Lewin (1925, 53) advocated that philosophers of science focus on description of the various sciences instead of deduction (Lewin 1925, 61; Lewin 1927, 279, translated as Lewin 1992). Compare Reichenbach’s advocating an “inductive” over a “deductive” method in the philosophy of science (Reichenbach 1920/1965, 75).
- 25.
Lewin (1949, 25–26): “Doubtless the researcher is deeply influenced by the culture in which he lives and by its technical and economic abilities. Not these problems of cultural history, however, are in question when the social psychologist has to make up his mind whether or not ‘experiments with groups’ are scientifically meaningful, or what procedure he may follow for developing better concepts of personality, of leadership, or of other aspects of group life. Not historical, but conceptual and methodological problems are to be answered, questions about what is scientifically right or wrong, adequate or inadequate; although this correctness may be specific to a special developmental stage of a science and may not hold for a previous or a later stage. In other words, the term “scientific development” refers to levels of scientific maturity, to levels of concepts and theories in the sense of philosophy rather than of human history or psychology.”
- 26.
Cassirer (1918/1981, 154–155).
- 27.
Reichenbach (1920/1965, 74–75).
- 28.
See, for instance, Reichenbach (1924/1969, pp. xii–iv).
- 29.
Cassirer (1906/1922, 16).
- 30.
- 31.
On the Marburg reading of Kant, Kant first isolated the transcendental method and applied it to Newtonian science; in fact, he mistakenly thought that the transcendental preconditions of Newtonian science were the fixed preconditions for all scientific cognition in all times (Cassirer 1906/1922, 18).
- 32.
Cohen (1902, 17).
- 33.
Cassirer read Kant as a proponent of the method. Reichenbach, however, thought that Kant’s philosophy confusedly mixed together questions about the logical structure of the sciences with psychological questions. See Reichenbach (1920/1965, 55ff.) and Reichenbach (1922/1981, 29). Schlick agreed with Reichenbach; see Schlick (1921/1979, 331): “Kant certainly wanted to purge [pure intuition] of everything psychological—but I shall never be able to persuade myself that he succeeded.” Cassirer defended his reading of Kant against Schlick in Cassirer (1921/1923, 451).
- 34.
See Lewin (1927, 279): “The Copernican Turn, with which Kant changed the question “Whether knowledge is possible” into the question “How knowledge is possible,” is one step”—though not the final step!—“in the development of the theory of knowledge from a speculative science into an observational science. Into a science, therefore, that begins with the investigation of the concrete objects lying before us, instead of a few concepts given ahead of time.”
- 35.
See Reichenbach (1924/1969, xiii).
- 36.
See Lewin (1949, 26): “A … reason why I feel Cassirer’s approach is so valuable to the scientist is his comparative procedure. Although Cassirer has not developed what might be called a systematic comparative theory of the sciences, he took important steps in this direction. His treatment of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, of historical and systematic disciplines is essentially of a comparative nature. Cassirer shows an unusual ability to blend the analysis of general characteristics of scientific methodology with the analysis of a specific branch of science.”
- 37.
Lewin (1925, 61). “Even Neo-Kantianism has produced works (e.g., Cassirer 1910) that contained descriptions of a concreteness about the relevant objects that were still not sufficiently concrete. Neo-Kantianism remained too bound to an essentialy deductive ‘System’; but it still attained a certain level of descriptive work within the frame of a system. With the question of ‘possibility’ the fundamental point of view of Kantianism remains the point of view of a not-descriptive theorizing; it remains directed toward generalities. The examples often carry the character of mere illustrations for thoughts that are derived from one or some few central ideas (above all from the idea of the unity of consciousness or of knowledge.)”
- 38.
See Lewin (1937).
- 39.
On these concepts, see the classic papers collected in Part II of Lewin (1999).
- 40.
Lewin (1949, 26).
- 41.
- 42.
Lewin (1949, 28).
- 43.
On this point, see Brown (1929).
- 44.
This passage is Cassirer’s commentary on Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1998), Bxii: “[R]eason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answers to questions of reason’s own determining. Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.”
- 45.
Lewin (1949, 27–28) cites with approval Cassirer (1910/1923, 144): “In truth, no physicist experiments and measures with the particular instrument that he has sensibly before his eyes; but he substitutes for it an ideal instrument in thought, from which all accidental defects, such as necessarily belong to the particular instrument, are excluded. … The corrections, which we make and must necessarily make with the use of every physical instrument, are themselves a work of mathematical theory; to exclude these latter, is to deprive the observation itself of its meaning and value.”
- 46.
Lewin (1931b, 37).
- 47.
Cassirer (1923/1955, 76, 77, 78).
- 48.
See Cassirer (1923/1955, 76): “The object cannot be regarded as a naked thing in itself, independent of the essential categories of natural science: for only within these categories which are required to constitute its form can it be described at all. … If the object of knowledge can be defined only through the medium of a particular logical and conceptual structure, we are forced to conclude that a variety of media will correspond to various structures of the object, to various meanings for ‘objective’ relations. The physical object is not the chemical object, nor is it the biological object, because physical, chemical, biological knowledge frame their questions each from its own particular standpoint and, in accordance with this standpoint, subject the phenomena to a special interpretation and formation.”
- 49.
- 50.
Ash (1994, 95).
- 51.
Duncker (1932/1933, 176), citing Lewin (1922).
- 52.
Lewin (1925, 50–51). There he argues that in the various stages of its historical development one and the same science will require different methods, and that different sciences in the same relative stage of their development will often employ the same method. He concludes: “In view of the fundamental tools [Grundzüge] of the method (also only in this sense) one can speak in the end of a ‘unity (better: homogeneity) of all knowledge.’”
- 53.
For a more detailed discussion of the contrast between “Substanzbegriff” and “Funktionsbegriff,” see Heis (201?).
- 54.
Lewin (1931b, 40, 44).
- 55.
Cassirer (1910/1923, 19–20).
- 56.
See Lewin (1927, § IV), which cites Cassirer to support the claim that the goal of an experiment is not to find very many equal cases, but rather to find a systematic variation among a sum total of different cases. He argues that, if one thinks of a law as a regularity, a rule, then one thinks that one proves that there is a law by finding the greatest number of equal cases [gleicher Fälle]. But this rests on a faulty theory of induction, refuted already by Cassirer.
- 57.
See Lewin (1926) for a criticism of associationist explanations.
- 58.
Lewin (1931b, 64–65).
- 59.
This equation, implicit in earlier works, was first introduced in Lewin (1936).
- 60.
See Marrow (1969, Ch.5). Again, the contrast is with associationism and Freudianism, which try to explain behavior in terms of past experiences rather than through the interaction with the present environment.
- 61.
Nowhere in Lewin (1931b) does he express any affinity for empiricism. Indeed, the only mention Lewin makes of empiricism is to point out that—paradoxically—the real advance in Galilean physics required introducing unobservable idealized objects like frictionless planes and perfect spheres (Lewin 1931b, 44–45).
- 62.
Neurath et al. (1930, 72).
- 63.
Reichenbach (1928/1957, 67).
- 64.
Reichenbach (1928/1957, 36).
- 65.
- 66.
Reichenbach (1920/1965, 77).
- 67.
- 68.
- 69.
Reichenbach (1920/1965, 36–37; 54).
- 70.
- 71.
Reichenbach (1922/1981, 38–39).
- 72.
Reichenbach (1922/1981, note 21).
- 73.
- 74.
There is another aspect to Cassirer’s resistance to Schlick and Reichenbach’s conventionalism, an aspect that I will mention but not further explore. Cassirer argued (against Schlick explicitly) that labeling linguistic meanings as conventions does not explain the prior question How is meaning possible at all? In fact, Schlick can settle for empiricism only because he (mistakenly) thinks that by labeling meanings as conventions he can avoid answering the question altogether. See Cassirer (1927, 136).
- 75.
Reichenbach (1922/1981, 30).
- 76.
Cassirer (1921/1923, 415).
- 77.
See Cassirer (1910/1923, 269).
- 78.
- 79.
Cassirer (1906/1922, 16).
- 80.
Cassirer (1910/1923, 269).
- 81.
Opposed readings of Cassirer’s theory of the a priori are given by Friedman—who recognizes only the second, absolute theory of the a priori in Cassirer and denies that he holds to the first (Friedman 2000, 115 ff.),—and by Richardson—who finds both theories in Cassirer’s writings but claims that their conjunction is inconsistent (Richardson 1998, ch. 5). In fact, as I argue, the second theory is not inconsistent with the first theory, but necessitated by it.
- 82.
I owe this phrase to Friedman (2001, 66). This is Friedman’s gloss on Cassirer’s claim that the philosophical analysis whose goal it is to isolate these a priori elements “at no given stage can be perfectly achieved.”
- 83.
Cassirer (1910/1923, 321–322): ‘Going back to such supreme guiding principles [i.e., the ‘form of experience’ that persists in all stages of the asymptotic progression toward the fully empirically adequate theory] insures an inner homogeneity of empirical knowledge, by virtue of which all its various phases are combined in the expression of one object. The ‘object’ is thus exactly as true and as necessary as the logical unity of empirical knowledge;—but also no truer or more necessary… We need, not the objectivity of absolute things, but rather the objective determinateness of the method of experience.’
- 84.
See Cassirer (1906/1922, 16): “The concept of the history of science itself already contains in itself the thought of the maintenance of a general logical structure in the entire sequence of special conceptual systems.”
- 85.
There is a further question: Could Cassirer relabel the relative a priori principles as conventions (as Reichenbach did)? Again, the answer is No, as Cassirer argues (for instance) at (Cassirer 1910/1923, 186–187) with regard to Newton’s principle of inertia. I hope to explain in a future work why Cassirer rejects conventionalism even in the relativized case.
- 86.
Reichenbach (1920/1965, 69–70). Padovani (2011) argues that Reichenbach in fact does distinguish in 1920 between relative a priori principles and higher level, meta-principles (such as the principle of probability and the principle of genidentity). This reading of Reichenbach brings him closer to Cassirer. Still though, what becomes of these principles after Reichenbach takes his turn to conventionalism? Are they also conventions? As Padovani argues, Reichenbach has no clear, worked out view after 1920.
- 87.
Reichenbach (1924/1969, 17–18).
- 88.
The quotation is from section 3 of Einstein’s (1916) “Die Grundlage der allgemeine Relativitätstheorie.” Petzold interprets this passage in a Machian way in Petzold 1921, 64. Reichenbach had earlier criticized Petzold’s reading in Reichenbach 1922/1981, 17 ff., following Cassirer’s criticism from Cassirer 1921/1923, 392–393. Reichenbach refers to Petzold’s reading (without giving his name) in Reichenbach 1924/1969, 16. The historical background to these debate is laid out in Ryckman 1992, cf. Ryckman 1994.
- 89.
Reichenbach (1924/1969, 5–6).
- 90.
Reichenbach (1924/1969, 6–7, 19).
- 91.
Cassirer (1921/1923, 427).
- 92.
Cassirer (1921/1923, 390).
- 93.
See note 45.
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Heis, J. (2013). Ernst Cassirer, Kurt Lewin, and Hans Reichenbach. In: Milkov, N., Peckhaus, V. (eds) The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 273. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5485-0_4
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