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Ern fi Mach

flucnce than Mach on this issue, and German and Austrian chairs of phiTosophyarc ocćupićcf tbday much morę by friends of Husscrl than by friends of Mach. Nor did Mach farę better with the “Vienna Circle”

Ior with "logical posmvism.” The devcIopmcnt of mathcmatical logie and the conccrn with abstract formalism has brushed asidc this aspcct of Mach s philosophy and mcthodology of science.

Mach attnbuted morę “certainty” to sensations than to the rules and assumptions bf fdrrnal logie or maUiemaucs. Many if not most oP his critics treated logie and mathematics as morę, or at least cqually,

I “ccrtain.” This was probably the root of their opposition. Mach ncvcr treated “analytic truth” as the sacred cow it has sińce becomc in Hngland and America, nor had he much sympathy with Husscrl's in-fallibilistic non-sensory “intuition."

Mach had influcntial methodological ideas on hypothcscs and Uie-orics. He pretended to follow Newton's rcjection of hypothcscs. In fact, howcvcr. as previously related, Newton and Mach did not mcan the same thing by them, and both men did use what we now cali “hypodjeses.” Mach opposed them as infercnccs beyond the appear-anccs and as speculation. He did, however, gram them a place in becoming science {w er den den Wisscnschaft) as somerimes uscful | “guesses” or “hunches.”⁴¹

Ernst Mach was strongly opposed to what he callcd “fictive-hypo thctical" science, in particular to the “as if" pragmatic approach of Hans Vaihingcr.⁴‘ If Mach’s biological and economic purposes of science had truły becn a first consideration with him, he prcsumably would havc rejected his belief in the “certainty” of sensations as “un-econornical" and would have followed the undogmatic approach of William James. Jcrusalem, Vaihinger and other pragmatists, but in-stead, he preferred to havc the best of both worlds. The ultimate justi-hcation for Mach'$ phenomenalism was prcsumably irs biological valuc, but in point of fact, Mach regarded sensory phenomena as ab-. solutcly certain and in this sense as their own justifienriom In other • words, whilc Mach often madę biological and cconomical defenses of his philosophy and mcthodology of science, both wcrc bascd on his phenomenalism in Jarge part, and had he to choosc between kceping his phenomenalism or his biologicocconomical approach all the evi-dence has suggested that he would havc retained his phenomenalism. James saw that his own version of phenomenalism, his so-callcd rad* ical empiricism, v/as logically independent of his philosophy of Prag-

rnatism. Mach, howcvcr, not only did not sec the disparateness in the two wings of his philosophy, hut dclibcratcly tried to justify cach in terms of the other, an approach that critics havc not bccn slow to cx-pose as illcgitimatc.'³

Mąch*S objcction to “fictivc-hypothctical" science was prcciscly that it would cast doubt on the certainty of sensations, and by doing that, prcsumably lcavc all science “up in the air.” Mach failed to notice that a consistcnt subordination of science to something as vaguc—and he ncver defined the notion—as “biological needs” could hardly rcsult in other than a “fktivc-hypotheticar science. Mach wanted both the' “certainty” of appcarances and the absolutc priority o£ "biological needs” butjhcre was~nb rational way to base a consistent philosophy on both thcsc notions. One had to be plausibly and uncquivocably subordinated to the other.

Mach’s attitude toward thcories_ has already becn discussed. He granted that ihey often had “provisional yalueJLcyen the atomie the-ory, but hc_ denied them all place in end science. They wćrc simply not aseconomical as mathcmatical functions.

Mach’s positivistic approach to scientific laws, his attempt “to cut them down to sizc,” was quitc influential. He was sharply critical of the belief in their “causal power” or “acsthctic beauty,” and denied them cxistcncc "outsidc," "prior to,” or as “intrinsje” with m." naturę.

Natural laws arc a product of our psychological needs, according to our vicw.⁴⁴

The grand univcrsal laws of physics ... arc not csscntially different from dcscriptions.⁴⁵

Laws cannot be ascribed to naturę. We find only as much “lawfulness” [ Gcsetzmassig\cit] in naturę as we oursclves havc assumed in simplif.ed cxtcrnal cxpericnce.⁴⁶

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Somc laws wcrc exprcssed in words and somc in terms of mathemat-ical cquations. Only rhose in terms of mathcmatical functions. which could not be simplificd further, were genuine “laws” in the sense of helonging in end science, for Mach. His belief in the idealized naturę of scientific constancics was cspecinlly influential 'On the thioking of Henri Poincare and Hugo Oingler, and on their well-known “cornen-tionalism.”

Mach rarely discussed the que$tion of evidence as a methodological factor in science, and when he did his idcas tended to bc negatisc. Ac

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