Constitutive Principles and Scientific Knowledge. The Concept of Constitution Between Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism and Phenomenology

This study is situated within the contemporary debate in the philosophy of science, in which various authors characterize certain physical principles as “constitutive,” yet without providing a satisfactory definition of the concept. The research first involves an examination of the original meaning of “constitutive principle” in Kantian philosophy, to then reconstruct the conceptual evolution of the term within the three twentieth-century philosophical movements that most extensively employed it in interpreting scientific knowledge: Neo-Kantianism, logical empiricism, and phenomenology. The study is limited to occurrences of the concept of constitution specifically in reference to physical theories. For this reason, it outlines the meaning and reinterpretation of the Kantian-inspired term with respect to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of quantum mechanics, the correspondence between Moritz Schlick and Hans Reichenbach on conventionalism, and Husserl’s analysis of the object of physics in the second volume of Ideas