The fin de siècle thesis

This paper examines the relations between John Heilbron's argument that fin de siècle physicists adjusted the image and substance of their discipline to cultural concerns, and Paul Forman's approach to acau-sality in the Weimar period. In addition to their focus on representation rather than truth, adherents of the "descriptionist" epistemologies that Heilbron identified also promoted an emphasis on method, statistical rather than causal explanations, historical understandings of epistemology, and stressed the relations between physics and other disciplines. Their views provide an intellectual context--within the physics discipline--for at least some part of what Forman had described as a capitulation to the hostile social environment expressed in Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes.