Hans Reichenbach Quotes on Knowledge
Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), the founder of the Berlin Society for Empirical Philosophy and a leading figure of the broader logical-empiricist movement, developed in Experience and Prediction (1938) and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951) the most sustained probabilistic theory of knowledge of the mid-twentieth century. The distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification — Reichenbach's formulation in Experience and Prediction — frames the project of rationally reconstructing scientific knowledge as a system of weighted predictions whose ultimate vindication lies in the frequentist analysis of induction the late Theory of Probability (1949) systematized.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“Probability is the language of induction.”
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Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“We must distinguish the context of discovery from the context of justification.”
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Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“The aim of philosophy is to clarify the language of science.”
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“Although it is admitted that certain differences cannot be verified by experiment, we should not infer from this fact that they do not exist. ...we are accused of having confused subjective inability with objective indeterminacy .”
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“...the order of betweenness does not depend on mutual distances... betweenness is purely a relational order.”
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“...the differential element of non-Euclidean spaces is Euclidean. This fact, however, is analogous to the relations between a straight line and a curve, and cannot lead to an epistemological priority of Euclidean geometry, in contrast to the views of certain authors.”
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“Visual forms are not perceived differently from colors or brightness. They are sense qualities, and the visual character of geometry consists in these sense qualities.”
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“...the mathematician uses an indirect definition of congruence, making use of the fact that the axiom of parallels together with an additional condition can replace the definition of congruence.”
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“We must... maintain that mathematical geometry is not a science of space insofar as we understand by space a visual structure that can be filled with objects - it is a pure theory of manifolds.”
The Philosophy of Space and Time(1928, tr. 1957)