Abstract

On the model of Newton’s Principia, the great majority of successful new theories in physics have been introduced by deduction from the phenomena arguments. In such arguments an explanatory theory is deduced from one or more of the empirical facts, or lower level empirical generalizations, which it is designed to explain, by the device of adjoining suitable higher-level theoretical constraints on the form of the required theory. Those theoretical constraints leave certain parameters, the precise form of certain functions, and so on, in the new theory, undetermined, except with the help of the lower level empirical premises.