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Historical Contingency and Theory Selection in Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

James T. Cushing
James T. Cushing*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

The central theme of this paper is that historical contingency plays an essential and ineliminable role in the construction and selection of a successful scientific theory from among its observationally equivalent and unrefuted competitors. Let me make a few clarifying remarks at the outset. It is not my claim that in all cases of theory selection there is in practice this radical type of underdetermination. Nor am I concerned with the rather trivial and philosophically uninteresting historical contingency of who did what when. For example, in response to Napoléon’s fishing for a favorable comparison between himself and Newton, Lagrange is said to have lamented (Gillispie 1960, p. 117; Moritz 1914, p. 167): “Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world established.“

Type
Part XI. Realism, Methodology and Underdetermination
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 446 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DIR89-08497.

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