HPS100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Falsifiability, Syllogism, True Basic
21 Sep 2017
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Chapter 5: the quine-duhem thesis and implications for scientific method. The quine-duhem thesis: a popular view in philosophy of science, duhem= physicist and quine= philosopher. When faced with disconfirming evidence- there is always crucial yet unstated auxiliary hypotheses involved. It is possible to reject an auxiliary hypothesis rather than rejecting the main view. Crucial experiments: crucial experiments: goes back to francis bacon( 1561-1626) where the idea is. When faced with two competing theories, it should be possible to design a crucial experiment for which the two theories give conflicting predictions. Since the predictions are conflicting- the crucial experiment will show that at least one of the theories are mistaken. Recall from last ch that receiving confirmation reasoning can only support a theory but cannot predict it to be completely correct. At least the experiment can show that at least one of the competing theories are incorrect. There are skeptics about the effectiveness of crucial experiments.
