Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

mutually incompatible theories. In that case,theory choice is ‘underdetermined’ by the evidence.Whether the evidence base is the fossilrecord or the Holy Bible, it is easy to see how manyconflicting interpretations can be generated, henceproviding intuitive support for the thesis. Nevertheless,this is not how science has been officiallyportrayed, at least since Newton claimed to have‘deduced from phenomena’ his laws of motion. Butif the underdetermination thesis is true, how doesone choose between theories that purport to savethe same range of phenomena?Pierre Duhem (1861–1914) is normally creditedwith the underdetermination thesis. He believedthat the question uniquely arose in his own discipline,physics, because of the laboratory conditionsin which experiments are normally conducted. Inthat case, how are the field’s artificially generatedresults to be judged in relation to alternativeaccounts of the natural world? As a Catholic livingin France’s Third Republic, with its clear separationof church and state, Duhem turned to divineillumination for guidance – but only because of theepistemic limits of physical inquiry implied bythe underdetermination thesis. Fifty years later,Harvard logician Willard Quine (1908–2000) universalisedand secularised Duhem’s original thesis.Quine replaced God with whatever theory had the62