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In Section 3.4, we reviewed a number of prior interpretations of Bohr's complementarity that concern themselves with its relation to the thought of various modern philosophers. These philosophers were mostly anterior to Bohr's times, although I also briefly touched on the issue of his possible links with contemporaneous logical positivism. Some other studies on Bohr, not mentioned earlier, indeed point to the relevance of still other twentieth-century philosophical approaches, and yet few of them seem to me to have particular bearing on the thematic of the present study. Edward M. MacKinnon, for example, argues that Bohr anticipated 'some of the key features [of philosophy] later developed in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations," with its major thesis that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (MacKinnon 1985, 115; Wittgenstein 1958, §43). In my view, however, this account overlooks an important difference between the two thinkers' ideas, namely the fact that, rather than reducing the analysis of a word to its use, Bohr sets the two – use and analysis – precisely in a complementary relationship in the sense of mutual exclusion and joint completion. Generally speaking, except for a few studies including Plotnitsky's to be discussed in Chapter 6, prior research on the relation between Bohr's thought and recent or contemporary philosophy has apparently failed to yield remarkable outcomes.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1748-0_5

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