Introduction
Among the different areas of philosophy of science, and more generally of philosophical and scientific enquiry, on which Evandro Agazzi has extensively worked, often with innovative and original results, is no doubt philosophy of physics, a discipline introduced in Italy by his groundbreaking treatise (Agazzi 1969).
That work soon established itself in the philosophical debate for the depth andG. Tarozzi (*)
Department of Basic Sciences and Foundations, University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”, Urbino, Italy e-mail: gino.tarozzi@uniurb.it © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_8 robustness of the analysis carried out and for the perspective from which Agazzi interpreted the role and function of philosophy of science, which he believes cannot be limited to a formal analysis of scientific languages, as claimed by at that time dominant neopositivistic philosophy.
This conviction derived to him also from his studies on the history of physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, culminating in the publication of the critical edition of Maxwell’s Treatise of electricity and magnetism (Maxwell 1973). These studies had shown that the mentioned neopositivistic claim had been largely dismissed by the most advanced developments of modern physics. In fact, a merely formal approach to physical theories left completely unsolved the most problematic issues posed by the theories of new physics, for instance the problem of unobservable entities, like ether, absolute space and time in relativitivistic theories, and the problems of simultaneously unobservable entities, as position and momentum, of the uncontrollable disturbance of the measurement processes, and of the dual nature, both wave-like and particle-like, of micro-objects in quantum mechanics.
For the previous reasons Agazzi believes that the philosophy of physics, and more generally of science, should focus its attention on the study of the foundations of scientific theories, addressing also the issues of philosophy of nature, such as the reality and the structure of physical objects, the subject/object relationship in the measurement theory, and the role of the principle of causality. These issues were considered metaphysical, in the sense of meaningless in the light of the neo-empiricist philosophy. The latter was in fact modeled on the oper- ationalistic methodology developed by the theories of physics of the early twentieth century, without a genuine critical confrontation with them and with their open problems.
As a matter of fact, the identification of the meaning of a concept with the procedures for its measurement, which led Einstein to the elimination of the non- measurable concepts of absolute space and time, was subsequently systematized by Bridgman through the operational definition of concepts in a new conception of science, which became a sort of benchmark for neo-positivist philosophy, which aimed to defend the same anti-metaphysical instance in philosophy.
To achieve this goal, it was necessary to find a linguistic analogue of the operationistic definition, i.e. a criterion through which meaningless propositions could be eliminated, like operationism had banished non-measurable concepts from physics, and later also from other sciences (think for instance of behaviourism in psychology, which required the abandonment of non-overt phenomena as consciousness, feeling and emotion). Neopositivists found a linguistic correlate of operationism with their criterion of verification, or verifiability, according to which the meaning of a statement is given by the method for its verification. Therefore, when this is not possible and, moreover, we are not dealing with an analytic and tautological sentence, we have a meaningless pseudo-proposition, and this was the case of philosophical principles.
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