The intelligibility objection against underdetermination
Principia 16 (1):121-146 (2012)
| Abstract | One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes—are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are not intertranslatable. Examples are drawn from a related discussion about incommensurability that shows that theoretical non-intertranslatability is possible. | |||||||||
| Keywords | Empirical equivalence underdetermination incommensurability untranslatability | |||||||||
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