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The Hunt for Scientific Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

Mary Hesse
Mary Hesse*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

The Duhem-Quine concept of the underdetermination of theory by evidence has perhaps been the most crucial influence on philosophy of science during recent decades. It is a concept that has brought together metaphysical and epistemological issues that had been sundered into a mass of non-communicating specialisms in the decline of positivism. It has given birth to a new spectrum of comprehensive theories about the nature of science, ranging from scepticism and historicism, to a near-Aristotelian revival of realism, essentialism and necessitarianism. By way of its implications for the indeterminacy of truth-values, it has revived discussion of theories of truth, meaning and realism in relation to science, and philosophers of science have gone back to the pre-positivist authors - Frege, Peirce, Mach, Poincare, Duhem – for their pioneering arguments on sense and reference, correspondence and consensus, realism, instrumentalism and conventionalism.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 2 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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