Figure 45:

                     Ernst Mach: Knowledge and Error.

                     Dordrecht: Reidel 1976.

 

Ernst Mach: Erkenntnis und Irrtum, 1905

Translation from the German by Thomas J. Cormack

 

 

CHAPTER I

PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT

 

pp. 1-2

 

2. The goal of the ordinary imagination is the conceptual completion and perfection of a partially observed fact. The hunter imagines the way of life of the prey he has just sighted, in order to choose his own behaviour accordingly. The farmer considers the proper soil, sowing and maturing of the fruit of plants that he intends to cultivate.

This trait of mental completion of a fact from partial data is common to ordinary and scientific thought. Galileo, too, merely wants to represent to himself the trajectory as a whole, given the inital speed and direction of a projected stone.

 

However, there is another feature that often very significantly distinguishes scientific from ordinary thought: the latter, at least in its beginnings, serves practical ends, and first of all the satisfaction of bodily needs. The more vigorous mental exercise of scientific thought fashions its own ends and seeks to satisfy itself by removing all intellectual uneasiness: having grown in the service of practical ends, it becomes its own master. Ordinary thought does not serve pure knowledge, and therefore suffers from various defects that at first survive in scientific thought, which is derived from it. Science only very gradually shakes itself free from these flaws. Any glance at the past will show that progress in scientific thought consists in constant correction of ordinary thought. As civilization grows, however, so scientific thought reacts on those modes of thought that serve only practical ends: ordinary thought becomes increasingly restricted and replaced by technical thought which is pervaded by science.

 

3. The representation [Abbildung] in thought of facts or the adaption [Anpassung] of thought to fact, enables the thinker mentally to complete partially observed facts, insofar as completion is determined by the observed part. Their determination consists in the mutual dependence of factual features [der Abhängigkeit der Merkmale der Tatsachen voneinander], so that thought has to aim at these. Since ordinary thinking and even incipient scientific thought must make do with a rather crude adaption of thoughts to facts, the former do not quite agree amongst each other.

Mutual adaptation of thoughts is therefore the further task to be solved in order to attain full intellectual satisfaction. This last endeavour, which involves logical clarification of thinking though reaching far beyond this goal, is the outstanding mark that distinguishes scientific from ordinary thought. The latter is enough so long as it roughly serves the realization of practical ends.

 

 

CHAPTER X

ADAPTATION OF THOUGHTS [GEDANKEN] TO FACTS AND TO EACH OTHER [ANEINANDER]

 

p. 120

1. Ideas [Vorstellungen] gradually adapt to facts by picturing [ein … Abbild … darstellen] them with sufficient accuracy to meet biological needs. The accuracy goes no further than required by immediate interests and circumstances, but since these vary from case to case, the adaptive results do not quite match. Biological interest further leads to mutual correction of the pictures to adjust the deviations in the best and most profitable way. This requirement is satisfied by combining the principle of the permanence with that of the sufficient differentiation of ideas.

 

The two processes of adaptation of ideas to facts and to each other cannot really be sharply separated. If the first sense impressions are already in part determined by the innate attunement of the organism in time, the later are influenced by the earlier ones. Therefore the adaptation of ideas to facts is almost always complicated by the mutual adaptation of ideas. These processes at first occur quite unintentionally and without clear consciousness. When we become fully conscious what we find within us is already a fairly complete world picture. Later, however, we gradually go over to continuing the processes with clear deliberation, and as soon as this occurs, enquiry [Forschung] sets in. Adaptation of thoughts to facts, as we should put it more accurately, we call observation; and mutual adaptation of thoughts, theory. Observation and theory too are not sharply separable, since almost any observation is already influenced by theory and, if important enough, in turn reacts an theory.