Hans Reichenbach Quotes on Truth
Hans Reichenbach’s Experience and Prediction (1938) and The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951) gave Berlin Circle logical empiricism its most influential statement of probabilistic philosophy of science. The central commitments — that the truth of scientific theories is not a yes-or-no affair but a matter of probabilistic confirmation by accumulating evidence, that the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning belongs to the context of justification rather than the context of discovery, and that the analysis of causation, time-direction, and the foundations of physics must be carried out through the rigorous philosophical reconstruction of actual scientific practice — articulate a distinctive synthesis of empiricism with probability theory. The framework, developed across Reichenbach’s exile from Nazi Germany via Istanbul to UCLA, shaped postwar American philosophy of science through Hilary Putnam (Reichenbach’s student) and the broader analytic engagement with confirmation, causation, and the philosophy of physics.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“There is no absolute time; time is relative to the frame of reference.”
-
Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“Probability is the language of induction.”
-
Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“We must distinguish the context of discovery from the context of justification.”
-
Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“The aim of philosophy is to clarify the language of science.”
-
Attributed to Hans Reichenbach:
“Causality is a regularity of succession refined by laws.”
-
“If along the path of truth, success (which was often near-failure unnoticed) is subjected to the same scrutiny and desire for improvement as failure, we may find ourselves in closer proximity to trees.”
Hans Reichenbach (1951). The rise of scientific philosophy . University of California Press. p. 326. ISBN 0520010558 . -
“We can... treat only the geometrical aspects of mathematics and shall be satisfied in having shown that there is no problem of the truth of geometrical axioms and that no special geometrical visualization exists in mathematics.”
The Philosophy of Space and Time(1928, tr. 1957)