Abstract
Over the course of a century, the debate on underdetermination has produced an abundance of versions of the thesis that evidence does not uniquely determine scientific theories. Almost everybody agrees that some weak transitory underdetermination is a historical reality while several strong renderings are clearly implausible. Thus, the real challenge of the debate consists in formulating the underdetermination thesis in a way that strikes the right balance between the extremes. Such a formulation reaches beyond the trivial observation that theories are underdetermined if relevant evidence is missing. It should be methodologically useful both for the working scientist and for the historian of science while evading the common objections.
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Notes
- 1.
Complaints about an alleged lack of examples are quite frequent in the literature (e.g. Norton 2008, 25). However, the fact that the underdetermination in classical electrodynamics has barely been discussed suggests that examples were searched for in the wrong place and that there are many more to be unearthed from the history of science (see also Section 7.3, item iv).
- 2.
We leave open the question if future evidence can decide between competing approaches. The issue is somewhat overrated since in the historical context one often finds disagreement about which assumptions are central to a framework and which are merely auxiliary. Still, given that the different approaches have all proved fruitful in the past, it is plausible that some core assumptions can be upheld no matter what evidence comes up. Otherwise, the previous successes of the various frameworks would seem a miracle.
- 3.
A comment on notation: To adequately mirror the distinction between deductive and ampliative underdetermination, I distinguish between empirical adequacy and non-empirical epistemic virtues.
- 4.
The better-known chapter VI of part two is much less telling about Duhem’s stance concerning underdetermination.
- 5.
Quine elsewhere discusses the epistemic virtues simplicity, familiarity, scope, and fecundity (1955). However, his elaboration remains rather detached from scientific practice mixing examples from everyday life with some superficial expositions of examples from physics.
- 6.
- 7.
Quine (1975) later corrects his stance and denies that these are genuine examples of underdetermination (cp. also Laudan 1990, 332–35). He demands that underdetermination “needs to be read as a thesis about the world” (1975, 324) concerning theories that are “equally sustained by all experience, equally simple, and irreconcilable by reconstrual of predicates” (328). By that time, however, Pandora’s box was already open.
- 8.
Magnus (2003, 1263) suggests that there is a sufficient condition for non-identity of theories, namely empirical inequivalence. However, this criterion falls prey to Laudan and Leplin’s point about the contextuality of empirical equivalence to be discussed below.
- 9.
Brown’s conventionalist twist has been criticized in Okasha (2000, 289–90), on the grounds that conventionalism is “just one possible response—and one which, with the exception of Poincaré, has usually appealed more to philosophers than to scientists”. This is historically incorrect. Geometric conventionalism was in various shades accepted by a considerable number of leading physicists at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century—among them (von Helmholtz 1870; Einstein 1921).
- 10.
A variable speed of light has been proposed in various physical contexts, most notably in cosmology. For example, Arnot (1941) suggests it to account for the Hubble expansion, a possibility discussed also by Popper (1940). In the more modern literature, a varying speed of light has been proposed to solve various problems of big bang theory, for example the flatness, the horizon, and the cosmological constant problems (e.g. Barrow 1999). The literature on changing natural constants in physics is rich and controversial. Over the years it has involved some of the finest minds in science; cp. for example Dirac’s widely-discussed suggestion of a varying gravitational constant (1937).
- 11.
“To give the history of a physical principle is at the same time to make a logical analysis of it” (Duhem 1991, 269).
- 12.
I thank the editors of this volume, Tad Schmaltz and Seymour Mauskopf, for helpful comments and criticism. I am also grateful to Mauricio Suárez for suggestions on an earlier version of this article as well as to audiences at EPSA09 in Amsterdam and at &HPS2 in Notre Dame.
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Pietsch, W. (2011). The Underdetermination Debate: How Lack of History Leads to Bad Philosophy. In: Mauskopf, S., Schmaltz, T. (eds) Integrating History and Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 263. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1745-9_7
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