Principles of Mechanics

Abstract

This work was published posthumously, after Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894) died at the age of 36 following an illness. He is now best known for having experimentally demonstrated the existence of electromagnetic waves, as had been predicted by Maxwell’s equations (the reason his name is used for the unit of electromagnetic frequency). But here he considers the very basis for scientific knowledge and theorizing itself. What is it that we do when we construct scientific theories? For Hertz, we depict the external world by means of “images or symbols of external objects … as by means of models” (p. 153). The criterion for the success of a theory is what we might now describe as empirical adequacy, but of a particularly stringent sort: in a successful theory, “the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured” (p. 153). Hertz’s view of theories is thus fundamentally representational, and scientific reasoning is performed on those images – mapping the causal structure of physical reality onto the logical structure of our theories, or, in Hertz’s words, ensuring “a certain conformity between nature and our thought” (p. 153). 1 Such models, then, are useful because they let us predict potential outcomes that might not otherwise have been observed due to their rarity (or even their impossibility without performing certain kinds of experiments).

Topics & Concepts