Abstract

Reanimated for the contemporary literature in the writings of Quine, [16]) and Kuhn [7], the conventionalism of Duhem [2] and Poincaré [12] has emerged in the last few years as one of the genuinely interesting topics in the philosophy of science. The theory in question—let us follow Grünbaum [3] in calling it the D-thesis, after its founder, Pierre Duhem—claims three things: a single scientific hypothesis H is never disconfirmable in isolation from its fellow; every single hypothesis H of science presupposes, explicitly or implicitly, the support of a conjunction A = A, • A2 • … • Am of auxiliary assumptions or hypotheses; the failure of an observational consequence of H in face of contradictory evidence disconfirms only the conjunction of H and A, not H alone—i.e. establishes only ∼. The logical picture is as follows