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Pierre Duhem Publishes "The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory"
"The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory" is Pierre Duhem's biggest contribution to the philosophy of science. Duhem's work presented three theses. These were instrumentalism, underdetermination of theories, and confirmation holism. Duhem's stance and reasoning on each topic is still in use today. -
Instrumentalism
Instrumentalism is the idea that theories should be used more as tools to help predict events, rather than as truth. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines instrumentalism as, "Instrumentalism, in the philosophy of science, the view that the value of scientific concepts and theories is determined not by whether they are literally true or correspond to reality in some sense but by the extent to which they help to make accurate empirical predictions or to resolve conceptual problems." (Neufville 2018) -
Underdetermination
Underdetermination could be considered Duhem's greatest single contribution to the philosophy of science. This theory states that to make any observations, certain assumptions had to have been made about the experiment, tools, etc. This means that if the result is not what was predicted, then the theory is not necessarily disproved, just that one or more of the made assumptions or theory could be wrong. -
Underdetermination Guide
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Confirmation Holism
The third theory in Duhem's work is confirmation holism. This was Duhem's stance that physical theories could not be viewed in isolation. This means that a physical theory cannot be right or wrong. Instead, Duhem states, "the most a physicist can say about a physical theory is that it coheres with the rest of physics or it does not." ("Pierre Duhem" 2019) Duhem took this stance becuase he believed it impossible to know when the wrong assumptions were removed from experiments. -
MLA Citations
Ariew, Roger. “Pierre Duhem.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 26 July 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duhem/#AgaNewMetDuhThe. Neufville, Robert de. “Instrumentalism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 27 Sept. 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/instrumentalism. “Pierre Duhem.” New World Encyclopedia, 28 Mar. 2019, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pierre_Duhem#Philosophy_of_science.
