Can Theories be Refuted?

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XXI

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2. Physical Theory and Experiment

   • Pierre Duhem

   Pages 1-40

3. Two Dogmas of Empiricism

   • Willard van Orman Quine

   Pages 41-64

4. Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes

   • Carl G. Hempel

   Pages 65-85

5. Postscript (1964) on Cognitive Significance

   • Sandra G. Harding

   Pages 86-88

6. Some Fundamental Problems in the Logic of Scientific Discovery

   • Karl R. Popper

   Pages 89-112

7. Background Knowledge and Scientific Growth

   • Karl R. Popper

   Pages 113-115

8. The Duhemian Argument

   • Adolf Grünbaum

   Pages 116-131

9. A Comment on Grünbaum’s Claim

   • Willard van Orman Quine

   Pages 132-132

10. Scientific Revolutions as Changes of World View

    • Thomas S. Kuhn

    Pages 133-154

11. Grünbaum on the ‘Duhemian Argument’

    • Laurens Laudan

    Pages 155-161

12. Quine, Grünbaum, and the Duhemian Thesis

    • Carlo Giannoni

    Pages 162-175

13. Duhem, Quine and Grünbaum on Falsification

    • Gary Wedeking

    Pages 176-183

14. Duhem, Quine and A New Empiricism

    • Mary Hesse

    Pages 184-204

15. Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

    • Imre Lakatos

    Pages 205-259

16. Is it Never Possible to Falsify A Hypothesis Irrevocably?

    • Adolf Grünbaum

    Pages 260-288

17. The Rationality of Science

    • Paul K. Feyerabend

    Pages 289-315

18. Back Matter

    Pages 316-323

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According to a view assumed by many scientists and philosophers of science and standardly found in science textbooks, it is controlled ex­ perience which provides the basis for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable theories in science: acceptable theories are those which can pass empirical tests. It has often been thought that a certain sort of test is particularly significant: 'crucial experiments' provide supporting empiri­ cal evidence for one theory while providing conclusive evidence against another. However, in 1906 Pierre Duhem argued that the falsification of a theory is necessarily ambiguous and therefore that there are no crucial experiments; one can never be sure that it is a given theory rather than auxiliary or background hypotheses which experiment has falsified. w. V. Quine has concurred in this judgment, arguing that "our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not indi­ vidually but only as a corporate body". Some philosophers have thought that the Duhem-Quine thesis gra­ tuitously raises perplexities. Others see it as doubly significant; these philosophers think that it provides a base for criticism of the foundational view of knowledge which has dominated much of western thought since Descartes, and they think that it opens the door to a new and fruitful way to conceive of scientific progress in particular and of the nature and growth of knowledge in general.

• falsification
• physical theory
• science
• scientific discovery

• Sate University of New York, Albany, USA

  Sandra G. Harding

Policies and ethics