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Notes on video lecture:
Duhem and Kuhn
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on November 21, 2014 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
Principa, planets, physicists, compare, paradigm, image, progress, three, thinking, community, wrong, weaker, incommensurable, isolation, truer, find, predecessor, falsification, deduce, Revolutions, falsify, interpret, underdetermination, rationality, phases, gravity, anomalies, textbook, inductive
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before Karl Popper developed                            as a possible method of science
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Pierre Duhem (1861-1916)
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"No scientific hypothesis can ever be tested in                   , but only in conjunction with other main hypotheses and auxiliary hypotheses"
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we don't test Newton's law of                by itself
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main
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           laws of motion
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auxiliary
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number of               
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whether attraction between planets is              than the sun and the planets
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we              a piece of evidence from these hypotheses
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but often we can't          it
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how should we then                    this negative result?
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clearly something has gone            with one or more of the hypotheses
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but we don't know which hypothesis it is
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this is the                                      of theory by evidence
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Thomas Kuhn
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1962 book: "The Structure of Scientific                       "
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changed our way of                  about science
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began career as a                     , then went to history of science
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science doesn't have a distinctive method whether                    or deductive
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we need to rethink the notion of                  in science
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changed image of science
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we used to see science as building on and improving on                       
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each on delivering a more accurate            of nature
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Kuhn argued science goes through three             
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1. normal science
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scientists work within a scientific                 
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scientists work on a specific text book, e.g. Newton's                 
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all scientific activity arises from this                  tradition
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in spite of what Popper said, in periods of normal science there is no attempt to                or refute scientific theory
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crisis
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occurs when a sufficient number of                    accumulate
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paradigm shift
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scientific                    shifts to new paradigm
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new paradigm should be able to solve the anomalies that the old paradigm could not
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paradigms are not            than another but are better than others in their capacity of solving problems
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scientific revolutions
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there was a shift from Popper falsification to Kuhn problem solving
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had implications in the debate on the                        of theory choice
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Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms are                               , they lack a common measure for rational choice
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but we can                paradigms

People:

######################### (1861-1916)
French physicist, mathematician, historian and philosopher of science best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages
  • he argued for holism in scientific experimentation in physics, namely that an experiment in physics is not simply an observation, but rather an interpretation of observations by means of a theoretical framework, no matter how well one constructs one's experiment, it is impossible to subject an isolated single hypothesis to an experimental test, instead, it is a whole interlocking group of hypotheses, background assumptions, and theories that is tested
  • also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics

Spelling Corrections:

auxilierary ⇒ auxiliary
physists ⇒ physicists
anomolies ⇒ anomalies

Ideas and Concepts:

Via tonight's Philosophy and the Sciences class: "underdetermination, n. refers to situations where the evidence available is insufficient to identify which belief we should hold about that evidence. For example, if all that was known was that exactly $10 was spent on apples and oranges, and that apples cost $1 and oranges $2, then we would know enough to eliminate some possibilities (e.g. we know that 6 oranges could not have been purchased), but we would not have enough evidence to know which specific combination of apples and oranges was purchased. In this example, we would say that belief in what combination was purchased is underdetermined by the available evidence."
Epistemic Relativism, Scientific Realism, and Falsifiability
Duhem and Kuhn