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One of the most distinctive features of Logical Positivist philosophy of science is its understanding of the nature, grounds, and function of the conventional element in scientific knowledge. The doctrine of conventionalism that first emerged in the writings of the early Positivists, and became a central dogma of Positivist thought, had its roots in previous philosophies ranging from Kant's to Wittgenstein's. 2 But one neglected source of Positivist doctrine is the earlier writings of those philosophers who became the acknowledged leaders of early Positivism. In fact, the leaders of the Vienna and Berlin circles, Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach, were corresponding as early as 1920 about issues which would figure centrally in later Positivism. Each had independently developed a philosophical analysis of the theories of Special and General Relativity which implied that traditional conceptions of the apriori were inadequate to comprehend the new physics. Initially, the approaches Schlick and Reichenbach each developed seemed quite at odds with one another. Schlick, on the one hand, thought the new physics entailed that Kantian apriorism was altogether wrong, while Reichenbach argued that Kant's doctrine of the synthetic apriori - with important modifications - accommodated the new physics quite comfortably. Clearly, both Schlick and Reichenbach thought that the development of the new physics bore profound epistemological implications concerning the role of the apriori in scientific knowledge. But whether, and to what extent, they agreed on the exact import of Relativity for the apriori remains unclear.3

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-211-71581-9_7

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