Abstract
What attitude should we take toward a scientific theory when it competes with other scientific theories? This question elicited different answers from instrumentalists, logical positivists, constructive empiricists, scientific realists, holists, theory-ladenists, antidivisionists, falsificationists, and anarchists in the philosophy of science literature. I will summarize the diverse philosophical responses to the problem of underdetermination, and argue that there are different kinds of underdetermination, and that they should be kept apart from each other because they call for different responses.
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Notes
This paper improved a lot thanks to the useful comments by anonymous referees for Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
A theory is empirically adequate if and only if what it says about observables is true.
I propose that a theory is approximately empirically adequate just in case most of its observational consequences are true.
Defining ‘approximate truth’ is such a huge issue that I set it aside here.
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Park, S. Philosophical Responses to Underdetermination in Science. J Gen Philos Sci 40, 115–124 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-009-9080-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-009-9080-6