Science and Hypothesis
Historical Essays on Scientific Methodology
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Larry Laudan
Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, multidisciplinary
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Book
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A Note on Induction and Probability in the 19th Century
This short chapter addresses itself to two of the more puzzling features of the historical development of the philosophy of science; first, why did it take so long for philosophers of science to bring the tech...
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Introduction
This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different peri...
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A Revisionist Note on the Methodological Significance of Galilean Mechanics
It has long been common for scholars to maintain that the science of Galileo posed most of the central philosophical and methodological problems for early modern philosophy. Historians as diverse in orientatio...
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Why was the Logic of Discovery Abandoned?
It is difficult to find a problem area in the philosophy of science about which more rubbish has been talked and in which more confusion reigns than ‘the philosophy of discovery’. It is even hard to keep the c...
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The Sources of Modern Methodology: Two Models of Change
In its most general form, the thesis of this chapter can be succinctly put: we have brought to the writing of the history of methodology certain preconceptions which jointly render it almost impossible to unde...
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William Whewell on the Consilience of Inductions
Few scholars would deny that William Whewell ranks among the major figures in 19th-century philosophy of science. His Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and his later Philosophy of Discovery remain among the cl...
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The Clock Metaphor and Hypotheses: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought, 1650–1670
My tasks in this chapter are two-fold: to trace the influence of Descartes on 17th-century philosophy of science in Britain; and to document the fortunes of the method of hypothesis in Britain in the period im...
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Hume (and Hacking) on Induction
Several years ago, Ian Hacking wrote a fascinating book called The Emergence of Probability (1975). It deals with several important issues in the history of epistemology and breaks new ground in its treatment of ...
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Peirce and the Trivialization of the Self-Corrective Thesis
The aims of this chapter are two-fold: first and primarily, to identify and to summarize the development of an important but hitherto unnoticed tradition in 19th-century methodological thought, and secondly, t...
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The Epistemology of Light: Some Methodological Issues in the Subtle Fluids Debate
There is wide agreement that new scientific theories often provoke a protracted discussion of their epistemic merits and their metaphysical presuppositions. Action-at-a-distance, vital forces, evolutionary the...
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John Locke on Hypotheses: Placing the Essay in the ‘Scientific Tradition’
It has often been assumed by advocates of the purist view of the theory of knowledge (a view outlined in Chapter 2) that John Locke was primarily an epistemologist with only a casual and superficial interest i...
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Ernst Mach’s Opposition to Atomism
In those annals of history which record the noble espousal of lost causes, the name of Ernst Mach is often linked with the opposition to atomic and molecular theories, along with such figures as Ostwald, Stall...
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Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought
In a famous passage in the preface to his Treatise, Hume expressed the fervent hope that he could do for moral philosophy what Newton had done for natural philosophy.1 In 18th-century ethics, literature, politica...
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Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s ‘Méthode Positive’
Judged by almost any criteria, Auguste Comte’s theory of positivism was an influential doctrine in the history of the philosophy of science. His contemporaries took it very seriously indeed, whether they were ...
